Digital Focus: Last-Minute Camera Gift Ideas, E-Mailing Digital Photos
Digital camera accessories make great last-minute gifts; plus, find out how to resize photos for e-mailing.Dave Johnson
Last-Minute Gift Ideas
Some folks are dedicated fans of holiday fruitcake. Me? I like gadgets. As a kid, I learned that shaking a present to see if it rattled was the best way to get right to the good stuff, and it's a strategy I've stuck with all the way into adulthood. If you're shopping for someone like me, even little goodies--like digital camera accessories--are immeasurably better than socks and fruitcake.
Digital Film
They're just little squares of silicon, but since they work like film, memory cards are as precious as gold to digital camera lovers. If you want to slip a memory card in someone's stocking, you'll need to know which format works with their camera--CompactFlash, SmartMedia, Memory Stick, or Secure Digital. And don't bother with a puny 8MB card; they hold so few pictures, they're more trouble than they're worth. Few photographers would complain about a nice 64MB or 128MB memory card, though. Two of the best sites for finding quality memory cards are Lexar and Sandisk.
You can also find some excellent prices on memory at PC World's Product Finder. For instance, I found a 128MB Sandisk CompactFlash memory card for just $54.
More Juice
Spare batteries and portable battery chargers are great gifts. Like a pack of spare razor blades, it may seem sort of utilitarian, but a Ni-MH battery charger and extra set of batteries can save a vacation. You can get rechargeable battery kits at most computer and photography shops for about $30.
Filters and Lenses
For a cool gift that will excite any digital photographers who want to expand their creative options, find out the exact camera model they have and surf over to Tiffen. There you can find add-on lenses for close-up, telephoto, and wide-angle shots. Or get a polarizing filter (for eliminating reflections in pictures that feature lots of water or glass).
Standing Tall
Do you know someone who loves to take portraits or landscapes with a digital camera? Then slide a tripod under the tree. Tripods come in all sizes, shapes, and styles. You can find really small ones designed to fit on a tabletop or larger models that stand on the ground. Here's a tip: You don't need a large, heavy tripod, since most digital cameras are small and light.
If you know your photographer likes to travel very light, consider getting a monopod. Monopods are extremely small, lightweight, one-legged supports. While you can order a tripod online, I suggest going to a camera store, where you can play with them to see how much they weigh and how convenient they are to schlep around.
Memory Reading
Show you care by helping your buddy ditch the serial or USB cable that connects the camera to the PC. With a memory card reader permanently attached to the computer's USB port, transferring pictures is as simple as taking a CompactFlash card out of the camera and inserting it into the reader, then dragging and dropping images on the Windows desktop. There are readers for virtually every kind of memory card. Check out Delkin, for instance--this Web site has small, stocking-stuffer-size card readers for SmartMedia, CompactFlash, and Secure Digital cards.
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Mini Review: MediaStudio Pro 6.5
IEEE 1394 (aka FireWire and iLink) cards and digital video camcorders make it look easy to create your own digital movies, but the truth is that good video is deceptively hard to do. Ulead's $495 MediaStudio Pro 6.5 takes a drag-and-drop approach to helping you make your own home video--and put it on DVD.
Make no mistake: This program (actually, a suite of five interrelated applications that tackle every aspect of video production) does have a bit of a learning curve. But I found it to be worth the effort. The program allows you to save finished video to videotape, but you can now create streaming video for Web sites and your own DVDs as well. A few days after installing the program, I was burning my own DVDs, complete with the same sort of startup menus that you'll find on commercial DVDs.
Windows has some nasty glitches that can interfere with your ability to make long movies, such as its maximum file size of 4GB. I was thrilled to see that MediaStudio obliterates that limit, allowing you to make movies of any length. MediaStudio also supports handy features like automatic scene detection, which automatically cuts your video into scenes for easier editing.
More powerful in many ways than Adobe Premiere, MediaStudio includes numerous extras. There's a tool for recording voice-over narration as your video plays in real time and some truly cool 3D transition effects that I haven't seen anywhere else. Best of all, MediaStudio includes a paint program that you can use to retouch and animate moving video. I used this nifty tool to brighten, paint, clone, and warp elements of videos on a frame-by-frame basis. My prognosis: It works great, but you'll also need an artistic flair to avoid making a real mess of your video.
If you want to jump on board DVD video and start making your own home movies, MediaStudio is worth a look. I found a vendor offering it for $410 using PC World's Product Finder tool.
Q&A: E-Mailing Digital Photos
Is there a way to e-mail pictures at a lower resolution and save them at the original size on my hard disk without having to save each picture twice on my hard drive?
-- Dave, Calistoga, California
A few weeks ago I answered a question about reducing the file size of large megapixel pictures when you e-mail them so they'll fit on the recipient's computer screen. Since then, I've been inundated with so much mail that I had to hire an intern to help me read it all. Like Dave in Calistoga, some of you wanted more details. Others wrote in with some excellent suggestions about software other than Windows XP that could automatically resize pictures to fit on the screen.
Kim from Dayton, Ohio, wrote to tell me about Photo E-Mailer, a $13 program that automatically adjusts the size of outgoing pictures as they're e-mailed.
Or you can recommend that your recipients install a better picture viewer. George Carpenter from Richland, Washington, recommends a $40 viewer called VuePrint. He reports that it handles virtually every format for pictures, sounds, and movies, and never makes images larger than the screen.
Raymond, from Pueblo, Colorado, has his own favorite: IrfanView, which is free for home use and $10 for commercial use. You can download IrfanView from our downloads library.
Finally, John from Sarasota, Florida, writes that Internet Explorer 6 can fit images to the screen as well.
Send your questions to question@bydavejohnson.com, and please be sure to let me know where you're from.
Hot Pic of the Week
Get published, get famous! Each week, we select our favorite reader-submitted photo based on creativity, originality, and technique. Every month, the best of the weekly winners gets a prize valued at between $10 and $100.
A gentle reminder, folks: We're disqualifying some really wonderful pictures every week because the submissions aren't following the rules. Be sure to include everything we ask for in the e-mail message, or your entry is wasted!
Here's how to enter:
Send us your photograph in JPG format at a resolution no higher than 640 by 480 pixels to hotpic@pcworld.com. Entries at higher resolutions will be disqualified immediately. If necessary, use an image editing program to reduce the file size of your image before e-mailing it to us. Include the title of your photo, along with a short description of the photo and how you photographed it. Don't forget to send your name, e-mail address, and postal address. Before entering please read the full description of the contest rules and regs.
This Week's Hot Pic:
Sunrise Docks by Mark McDonald, Starnberg, Germany
Mark says:
"I captured this scene one early fall morning on my way to work in Munich, Germany. By chance, I had my camera with me, and I couldn't help but take a few moments to capture the scene. The picture was taken with a 2.1-megapixel Canon IXUS 300, set on automatic. I didn't make any corrections to the image."