The next stop on our camera tour is how to set up your camera’s resolution. Before taking a lot of photos, you need to ensure that your camera is recording the pictures at the optimal resolution for your needs.
Low resolution is great for emailing or uploading to the web. It doesn’t take up a lot of hard drive space or room on your flash memory card.
On the other hand, hard drive space and memory cards are cheap and you can always shrink your photo’s file size to make it easier to email and upload.
The benefit of higher resolution photos is that you can zoom in really tight for cool effects or to print out a large photo. You can never make a low resolution file bigger (and still have it look good), but you can always save a large file at a lower resolution.
To set the resolution on a Kodak Easyshare camera, you hit the menu button, scroll down to the star icon and press ok. You then adjust the resolution to the highest setting.
On the Nikon Coolpix, you hit the menu button to get into the shooting menu. You then go to the Image mode options to set the resolution.
As you can see, each camera is different, so make sure to read the manual for detailed directions.
The photo above was taken at 1.2 MP resolution (the lowest resolution on the Kodak). We also took a photo of the same scene at 8.1 MP, the highest resolution on the camera.
Here is a view of the 8.1 MP photo zoomed to 100%.
100% zoom of high resolution photo
We can still see good detail of the flowers and leaves.
If you’d like to see the same close-up with the low resolution photo, this is what you’d get:
close-up of low resolution photo
Those pixels look more clear than the flowers!
Why does this matter? If you ever take group photos, you’ll want to zoom in to see the individual faces.
Try taking some photos of your friends at both the highest and lowest resolution settings on your camera. After you import the photos to your software on your computer, try zooming in to someone’s face in both photos. Which do you like better?
Next try emailing both versions of the photo to your friends. Which took longer to email?
A good rule of thumb is to take the photos at high resolution. If you want to email or publish any of them to the web, save a copy at lower resolution for those purposes.
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