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First of all you will be best off by following a certain procedure in all stages through out the process of catching the grand child riding a horse for the first time and to the multitude of finishing points you would like.
What is important is that the procedures become natural, easy and with no mistakes. For procedures to become natural to you, you have to do things the same way every time and in a way that comes close to generally established way of working. It is very important that you learn procedures that are optimized for speed and reliability, because if you don't you will be more and more sluggish with the procedures and you will end up with mistakes and not knowing if you really still have your pictures or if there is free space available for new pictures, etc.
I suggest procedures that are close to the "good old 36mm film" way of doing thing. I stick to these old fashion methods because manufacturers aim at designing the digital cameras with pretty much the same properties as the old cameras and secondly because the old procedures make the most sense to most grown up people.
- Take a series of pictures.
- Go home and move the pictures from the camera to your computer.
- Make sure all pictures came to your computer and verify that the camera is empty.
- Remove (delete) unwanted pictures from the computer. (Unsharp, mistakes, test shots, etc.).
- Make the remaining pictures Read/Only. This is like your developed film - the originals.
- Do a touch-up on all the photos and save the modified ones with a suffix to the original name.
- Make paper prints of any of the final pictures.
- Upload selected and reduced pictures to a photo-collection on the Internet.
- Make backup to CD, DVD, BlueRay or USB-harddisk.
1) Take a series of pictures.
The really good part about about modern digital cameras is the ability to assist the photographer to an extend where it is almost difficult to take a technically bad picture. Even the lowest priced cameras are likely to have auto focus and auto exposure. It is however, a very good thing to have the basic knowledge of handling light, perspective and the use of mechanical support.
Depending on how serious you are about taking pictures, you might want to take all your pictures in RAW format. The cheapest range of cameras cannot save your pictures in RAW format, but then again, you might also not be so super critical about your pictures then. The RAW format is what your camera works with internally, with the full glory of all the pixels. Using JPEG/JPG format saves a lot on picture size, thus your camera can hold a lot more JPEGs than RAW ones.
If you set your camera to save in JPEG format, you have the possibility of choosing the geometry or size of the pictures. It doesn't always make sense to use the largest format possible, it very much depends of what the pictures are intended for. If for example you want to take photos of a number of cars you want to sell on the Internet, you have absolutely no use of a picture 2800 x 1800 pixel. You wouldn't be able to upload such a large picture to the Internet auction and all the handling along the way is just getting slower that need be. In this case I would have chosen something like 320 x 240 or eventually 640 x 480.
Apart from the issues mentioned above, I do not think anything else left, but to go out there and get some pictures in the box.
2) Go home and move the pictures from the camera to your computer.
On both Apple, Windows and Linux it is fairly easy to attach the camera to the computer and copy/move/import all the pictures to dedicated photo folders/directories on the computer. This article puts it's focus on Ubuntu Linux and therefore I will talk about the use of F-Spot Photo Manager which is the standard application jumping into your face when you attach your camera.
First you would like to tailor F-Spot to your liking. Start the Applications --> Graphics --> F-Spot and in Edit --> Preferences you should check that you Import to the folder of your choice.
In Edit --> Manage Extensions you might want to enable DevelopInUFRaw in case you use the RAW format in your camera.
Then close the F-Spot application.
Attach the camera and wait for F-Spot to appear.
An alternative to the slightly pathetic F-Spot is to use digikam. The application digikam is for KDE and will normally install a humongous amount of huge files. To avoid this, run aptitude with the -R option and add the following four repositories:
In a terminal window
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/digikam-experimental/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/digikam-experimental/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-experimental/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-experimental/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main
You use digikam in much the same way as F-Spot and with digikam you can do a lot more in a much happier and productive way.
Advanced hints:
Batch manipulation.
mogrify -resize 50% *.JPG
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