Extra Tips
Here are some tips and pointers that you won't find in the book. I'll add more as I can—and if you have some tips of your own, please send them to me. Thanks!
Avoid Heart Attacks: Get PhotoRescue
• Maybe you're an old pro at digital photography by now and never accidentally erase your camera's memory card. Not me—I did that the first day I got mine. Fortunately, I'd read about PhotoRescue beforehand. The $29 PC/Mac program lets you retrieve "erased" images from a photo memory card, as long as you haven't overwritten them with new images.
Save Your Pixels By Cropping In Camera
• It's always tempting to just get your subject in the middle of the frame, fire away, and figure you can crop out the background later on your computer. But unless you've got a superpro-level digital camera with 11 megapixels, those pixels are too valuable to just throw away. The more you crop after you take the picture, the harder it becomes to produce a big print that's still sharp. It's much better to crop your image before shooting by moving closer to your subject. The problem, however, is that the viewfinder and LCD screen on most consumer-level digital cameras does not show exactly how much of the subject actually winds up in the image. Many viewfinders and LCDs only show 80-85 percent of the actual image. If you use the viewfinder/LCD as your guide for framing the picture, that invisible 15 percent of the image winds up as background, which you then have to crop out. Avoid the problem by doing some test shoots and compare what you thought was going to be the picture's border with what it actually turned out to be once you moved the images to your computer. That way, you'll have a much better sense of how close to crop in the camera—and avoid throwing out useless background pixels you can devote to your subject instead.
Scanner Enemy #1: Dust
• When it comes to scanning your old prints, dust remains the main enemy. Sure, you can always knock it out using your photo editing program, but it's much easier to avoid it in the first place. If you must wipe smudges off a print, do it away from the scanner to avoid creating static electricity, wait a minute before putting the print on the scanner bed, and use a can of compressed air to blow off any remaining dust. Also be sure the glass of the scanner bed is smudge free before you start.
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