This and That: Still Amazed

      by Elizabeth B. Wright         April 2004

One thing about being a senior citizen is having lived long enough to remember when some things were not a part of our daily life. I remember seeing a traveling show in the late 1930's featuring  closed-circuit TV demonstrations. Of course, as a pre-WWII child, it was difficult to understand what the science was behind the demo, but felt it was important. I don’t remember all of the wonderful “futuristic” examples that particular show had, but do remember rural electrification was included. Yes, there was a time in this world when only towns and cities had electricity. Anyone under the age of 50 might find that hard to believe.

So here we are in the computer age, and amazement is still a wonderful emotion. Also learning new things is exciting. In the last week, that has included learning how easy it is to install a tray/receiver combo in a computer to make it possible to remove a hard drive for safe storage away from the machine itself. Oh yes, I ran right out and bought one, but true to form, it hasn’t gotten installed yet. Hopefully next month’s article will be extolling the wonders of this latest device. Or possibly, the snags caused by my hardware setup resisting the idea of a new component.

But that’s not all. Owning a digital camera and knowing how to get the most out of it are two different things. For that reason, perusing books and attending the PCUG “Imaging” study group (formerly referred to as a SIG) are two ways to increase one’s ability to use and enjoy a camera. The term “Raw” was mentioned in one of the books and it meant nothing at all to me. The book probably explained it, but not in a way that this user could fathom. So naturally the question was taken to our “Imaging” group where J.P. Williams, as usual, not only knew about the subject, but was able to explain it in terms related to what we already had studied. Most of us have at least a passing understanding of .tif (tiff) and .bmp (bitmap) formats as well as .jpg (jpeg) image compression. These formats are usually available on higher end digital cameras. But now some have come out with the ”Raw” option. Using this setting, if it is available on your camera, means the picture will have no particular formatting, and includes all the data the camera’s lens takes in. Instead of deciding which data to use and which to ignore, all of it is recorded. The resulting file size is even greater than a .tif format, which spells trouble for cameras with small amounts of storage. But hopefully a good memory system is a part of your camera. Later, you can decide on the final format when you bring the image into the photo manipulation program on your computer. It’s not clear to me whether all imaging programs, such as Adobe PhotoShop, Corel PhotoPaint, JASC Paint Shop Pro and others can accept the Raw data, but I will get the answer to that. Since my camera may not have this option, this knowledge may be something which will be of no use in my world, but might be something to pass on to others with better cameras.

Memory Lane has found me digging out all those really old photos this month. Strangely enough, some of the ones in a batch of pictures from 1927 also have the negatives with them. Now the work in progress is  getting some of those negatives professionally cleaned, scanned to a CD and printed. If they turn out well, they might be worth showing in a future column. The negatives for this project were in the old 120 size film which made wonderful contact prints large enough to enjoy. I have recently restored some of the faded prints from the same batch of old film using the photo software  on my computer. The quality of the images is good enough to allow for making much larger prints. By being able to print them at home, enough copies can be made to pass on to all five of my grandchildren. Also, CD’s containing the scanned images will be available to them.

I also learned this month not to lose a check made out to cash. But that’s another story and has little to do with computers. Just take my advice, don’t tear a check for cash out of your checkbook until you are ready to exchange it for the money. This is gratuitous advice from “been there, done that.”

    Elizabeth Wright is a member of the OKCPCUG and a regular writer for the eMonitor