Working with Your Holiday Pictures

Well it is the holiday season again and you may be thinking I love to take picture but my camera isn't what I want or why do I have so many blurry pictures or what in the world do I do with them once I take them.

This article is going to break down the type of camera that you may want, how to take the best shots, what to do with them after you take the pictures and how to store them.

First let's tackle the type of camera that works best. There are many different cameras on the market that start at 1 mega pixel to 7 mega pixels, the ones that are 4 and 5 works well for the money. You will want a nice size LCD screen; you should look for ones that are between 1.8" to 2.5". Are you like me and take blurry pictures? If you get at camera with 3xs optical zoom or higher this will help take the blur out of the pictures. So now that you have the basics, who is the best camera manufacturer? Canon's and Nikon's are the best cameras on the market. You can buy one of these cameras for less that $300.

Okay now that you have your dream camera you want to know what all these settings are about. Please review the manufactures instruction guide for specific instruction but we will discuss some of the basics on settings. First let's decide what we are going to do with the pictures. If you are just going to email the pictures to family and friends you can change the setting to mega pixels to 2 this will produce picture that are 640x480. If you want to print the pictures, you will want to keep the mega pixels at the highest possible setting. Setting tips:

i. Make sure you remove the time and date from the pictures if you don't want them showing up covering the picture.

ii. If the object is standing still make sure you have the camera on a still setting. For moving objects make sure you select an action setting.

iii. Set your flash to auto so the camera will know how much light is available before taking the picture.

iv. If you are going to take moving video with your camera, remember there will be no flash so take daytime shots, and remember to turn off the video when you are done or it will eat up all your memory!

Did you buy additional memory? Do you need additional memory? How much memory do you really need? This all depends on the number of pictures you are going to take. A 64 Mega Byte card will take about 100 pictures. A 128 mega byte card will take about 150 pictures. A 256 mega byte card will take about 200 pictures. If change your setting to a lower mega pixel you will be able to take additional pictures with the memory card.

So now that we have talked about the basic camera needs you want to know what to do with all of these wonderful pictures that you have taken? I have taken some of the questions that I have received about saving pictures and put it in an easy to read version.

Q: Which folder should I keep my pictures in?

A: If you are running Windows XP, you should save your pictures to the MY PICTURES in the MY DOCUMENTS folder. To make it easier to find your pictures at a later time you should make a sub folder for each time you upload your pictures.

Q: I have Gmail and I want to save my pictures there. Can I?

A: Yes you can. If you have an X-Drive or Gmail you can load your pictures there. This will help you reduce backing up your pictures. The only down side to doing this is that you can only save about 300 pictures to these places. The average camera user saves about 2000 pictures on their hard drive.

Q: Do I delete the pictures from the memory card after I upload them to my computer?

A: Yes. You will want to delete the pictures so that you have the space on your memory care for additional pictures for future use. Please be sure that you back up your system so that in case of computer failure that you have these stored.

Now that you have your dream camera, you know how to use it, you have loaded them on to your computer, you feel that you have done all that you need to do. Well I suggest one more thing so that you will not lose those precious memories. You will want to back your pictures up. So you want to know how to back them up? There are for types of backs up that you can do.

1. A DVD or CD

Depending on the size of the pictures folder you can burn the folder directly onto a CD or DVD and store the disk away for safe keeping. There are even programs that will turn your pictures into a slide show if you plan on giving a copy of the DVD or CD to others to view.

2. An external hard drive

By storing them here if lowers the hassles of burning data and keeping track of the disk. Plus if you get a 160 GB external hard drive you don't have to worry about running out of space.

3. A memory card

If you have under 1000 pictures, you save them to a memory card or even an IPod. This way you can easily transfer the pictures to another computer or even print them out at a Wal-Mart or target store.

4. Online Storage

There are larger capacity online storage centers than X-Drive or Gmail. Paying a monthly fee, you are able to store all your pictures online so if anything happens to your house that the computer is in, your pictures are always safe. I would recommend either Iron Mountain (www.connected.com) or Pulkin Computer Services (www.pulkin.com).

Now that you have found a back up method that works for you, you know want to know how often that you need to back them up. First, you should always do a back up when you up load new pictures to your hard drive. You should also plan on doing a monthly back up just as a precaution. Unfortunately, the unthinkable has happened and you now need to restore these pictures. This is not has hard as you think. First you go to your back up and reverse the steps that you had taken to back them up to begin with. If you are using an on line service you can log in to the service and recopy the pictures to your My Pictures folder. Please made sure that you wait until your computer is back up and running at full functionality before restoring any of your backed up data. Last but not least what if you lost one of your pictures? If you think that it is on your computer you can do a search for it by using Windows XP. If you are not able to find it there, just check to make sure that you didn't accidently delete it and it is sitting in your recycle bin.

I hope that you found this information helpful. Happy holidays to all of you and enjoy taking pictures this year.