Thanks to all for such good advise. I especially like the thought of thinking in "Pixels"
In my original email about my new Minolta A2, I should have said my next week vacation is a one week cruise to Alaska and that I use a Mac G5 and it does have a super drive so I can burn CD's and DVD's to store my images if I wish.
Depending on how many pix you take, doing the burn every night might be a good way to keep them organized.
PS: I was really surprised to discover that if I shoot in the manual mode I am expected to judge the image's exposure using the LCD screen. That would be a good trick in bright sunlight!
that's why you need to do all the preparation with the manual before you go. So that you know how to adjust your exposure compensation for different lighting situations. I just had a friend over and we were talking about the way these digital sensors tend to blow out the brights and how much we learned to underexpose. With the D100 I found a third of a stop to cover many blownout highlights, and also that the digital capture contained a lot of info in the darks that could be pulled out in Photoshop. Best to do that with an adjustment layer, but you can't in Elements because adjustment layers are one of the features excluded from Elements.
You may be able to adjust the brightness of the LCD but still there will not be a real correlation between what you see there and what you end up with when you download. Pros depend on the histogram and if your Minolta will let you view that, learn how to interpret it before you leave.
I did follow Emily's advise about shooting and immediately viewing the images on my Mac. I even printed a few which answered a lot of my questions.
Shooting every thing in Raw is intriguing, but my Minolta manual says Raw images need to be processed with their Minolta software to use the image.
That may be. Certainly each manufacturer seems to have proprietary software to open RAW images. Photoshop CS, I believe, will do it without the proprietary software, however.
I will probably do that in the future but for now I plan to download my A2 vacation images into Apples "iPhoto" for storage and then burn a DVD slide show of the best images and send them out to anyone who wants to see my Alaska pictures. A few images I will probably send with emails. If I get lucky I may even make a print for myself.
iPhoto will resize for emailing, too.
My guess is that if I shoot in raw I would not be able to use iPhoto's library to store my images.
Yup.
The A2 does have a setting for making a Raw image and a jpeg image with just one click. Must be for people like me!
Good plan. Do it! Just make sure you have two 512M cards with you. And a spare battery and the charger. If you plug the card into the Mac and let it come up on the desktop as a drive, you can copy the entire card into a folder on the desktop. Then you have the whole shoot ready to burn.
Have a blast.
--
Emily L. Ferguson
mailto:elf@xxxxxxxx 508-563-6822
New England landscapes, wooden boats and races, press photography http://www.vsu.cape.com/~elf/
