Many people store traditional photographic negatives for many years so that future generations can look back on family memories or historic events. They can also be used to create new prints if the original prints are lost or damaged. Negatives keep for a long time. Treat your digital photography the same way. Unlike traditional photographic materials the image quality will not degrade over time, but you must be careful to store the file safely.

Digital storage devices have limited lifetimes and can fail. Do not keep all your photographs on your computers hard disc. Hard discs can fail and when they do the data cannot usually be recovered. Make regular backups! Tapes and floppy discs can be used but have rather limited life, only 5-10 years. CD-R (recordable CDs) on the other hand should last 100 years if stored carefully. CD-RW discs do not last so long. It is usually possible to store hundreds of digital camera pictures on one CD and since it is easy and cheap you can easily make copies.

Digital cameras with over 1M pixel sensors can capture a page of text from a book, magazine or newspaper very well and much more quickly than a scanner. It can also be used to capture white boards in meetings. If you want to try this select a high-resolution capture mode in your camera, also try to ensure the lighting on the document is even and there are no shadows falling on the document or whiteboard. It is usually best to turn off the flash in the camera and use better room lighting or daylight. Select close-up mode if your camera offers it, the button sometimes has a picture of a small flower on it. Hold the camera straight and directly above the document. Use a medium zoom setting, not wide angle or telephoto, to minimize barrel distortion. Note that some camera optical viewfinders do not work very well for close-ups, use the LCD display on the camera to do the setup if you can. After you take the picture use the Background to White function in Ulead Ulead Photo Explorer 7.0 Pro to clean up the shots, especially if you want to print them.

These values refer to the focal length of the camera lens at different zoom settings, lower numbers are wide angle, higher numbers are telephoto. They are often marked on the lens. Since the CCD (the device used to collect the light) in the digital camera is much smaller than a film camera then all the lenses and their focal lengths are smaller too. A digital camera with a 6-15mm lens and a certain size CCD has exactly the same range as a regular film camera with a 28-72mm zoom lens. To further complicate the issue, the sizes of CCDs used in cameras are not standard. To make it easier some manufactures quote their zoom lenses in ?5mm equivalent?sizes, which is more convenient (note that in this case the 35mm refers to the size of traditional films!). The following shows how this works:

Use of different zoom settings has a strong effect on perspective in the picture. Wide-angle lenses distort pictures of people faces and tend to make them look fatter with larger noses! Sometimes lenses are quoted as 2X or 3X. This refers to the range, so a 25-50mm would be 2X and 25-75mm would be 3X. This measurement is used more often for video cameras. When buying a camera keep in mind that X values cannot be compared. You should also look at the range covered; a 70-140mm lens would be 2X, but would not be able to photograph close subjects, a 35-70mm lens is also 2X but would offer very different performance.