The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
History was made last week when an amateur filmmaker won the Sundance Film Festival. While amateurs making films are not news, what is news is that the entire film was made on a budget of just over $230 using iMovie video editing software which comes free with every Apple computer. Pictures are everywhere these days, both video and still. Everyone is making their own using digital technology. We buy $99 webcams to hook to our computers, a decent quality digital video camera can cost around $600, and Kodak has announced that digital still cameras are outselling film cameras by almost 2:1 in North America and Western Europe. Shooting videos and photographic stills has gone from being a marginal, expensive hobby for a few people, to something that it seems everyone is doing. Falling prices, rising quality, and ease of use has made pictures something everyone is doing. Digital still cameras are for sale in almost every size, shape, and price range. From those smaller then a credit card, to bulky, professional quality cameras worth several thousand dollars. Over the last two years, digital still cameras have become extremely powerful and capable of taking pictures often as good as a 35mm film camera. The resolution of cameras is measured in megapixels, which means millions of pixels. The more pixels a camera can shoot, the better quality the picture will be. But better pictures also mean larger files. This has caused companies to develop the technology for extra storage for pictures. This picture storage is often on cards called flash memory. These small cards allow the files to be stored on them instead of being stored on the camera itself. Digital video cameras are amazing little gadgets. I bought a mini DV last summer and was amazed at the size of the thing when it came out of the box. They are tiny. As well, many of the new video cameras have the ability to take still photos as well, so you only need one camera to do both jobs. It is a great convenience that these cameras are so small, but it also means the companies have had to shrink the batteries as well. Many cameras will only shoot about an hour of video before needing to be recharged. Once you've chosen a camera that meets your needs, all the goodies come next. Photo printers allow you to print out the pictures you want hard copies of. The quality of the pictures you print depends on both the resolution quality of your camera, and that of your printer, so make sure you do your homework before spending any money. Flash storage cards will allow you to hold more pictures on your camera before having to dump them onto a computer. I have a 256MB card for mine and it will hold over 900 lower quality pictures, so memory is cheap. Most cameras also come with software of some type which will allow you to do some basic things such as resize your pictures, take out red-eye, or flip them on way or another, but once again, it's important to check out what you're getting before you spend your money. In the end, do your homework to make sure your camera does what you want it to do before you purchase anything.
