Digital photography (and some news)

This week Tim, Ross and Dominik talked some more about Apple News. Dominik reminded everyone that iPod Touch can connect to WiFi and that sparked a quick discussion of the free municipal WiFi in Norwich - Tim was right about its reach. The upcoming Apple announcement that is all but certain to include the iPhone in the UK was also mentioned. And it turns out that Tim and Dominik prefer Facebook while Ross is a MySpace fan.We also talked a little about a great deal students can get on Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate at TheUltimateSteal.co.uk and the free alternative OpenOffice.org. Next week, Dominik will be reporting from an Open Source conference in Barcelona and talking about free and open source software. And now for this week's theme: Digital photography:

• Buying a digital camera
• don't just focus on pixels any more for consumer cameras good glass lens is more important
• don't look at digital zoom, only optical
• low light performance may also be important
• check out some review sites first: //www.dpreview.com, //www.digitalcamerasreview.info, //www.steves-digicams.com
• phone cameras are usually not very good quality (even with a high pixel count)
• Using a digital camera
• shutter lag makes taking digital pictures different
• many people don't know you need to push the shutter button half-way in first, wait for the zoom to lock in and then press it the rest of the way
• TIP: you can use zoom locking to take pictures even into the sun> 1. Aim the camera at an object in about the same distance, 2. push the shutter button half-way in, lock the zoom BUT don't push it all the way, 3. Aim the picture at the object in the sun and take the picture.
• What to do with the photos
• BACK UP! Buy a large external hard-drive (250GB for #50) and back up a copy of all your pictures; THEN buy another one for a second copy and store it in a safe place
• Print a few of them: Jessops or supermarkets will print them out from a card or CD. Their quality is usually higher than home ink-jet printers (unless you have the right paper and the right printer) and the photos are cheaper.
• Share them online! Flickr.com offers free storage and great tools for creating albums and sharing them with others. See Dominik's pictures on //www.flickr.com/photos/dominiklukes. Create an account, join the Future Radio group on //www.flickr.com/groups/futurenorwich and share your favorite pics with other listeners.
• Some Flickr alternatives are PhotoBucket, SmugMug, TinyPic and many others.