Took the photos with a new SiPix SC-2100, 2.1 mega pixels, digital camera. Got the camera from tigerdirect.com for $130, about $60 less than well-known brands, like HP, in the same class (2 meg pixels, no optical zoom). Would have liked an optical zoom, but they started at $300+. Higher resolutions started at 3 times the price.
Bought a 256 mb compact flash for $90, well worth it. The card held all 460 pictures I took during the week and outlasted three sets of batteries.
Bought a set of accessories, including batteries and recharger. Another good buy, from REI, was a $20 hard, water proof case. The case was not put to the test on this trip, but felt good about keeping the camera inside. At the high risk times of shoving off and beaching the canoe, always sealed the camera in the case.
Did not get a chance to practice much with the camera before the trip, so was lucky the pictures came out as well as they did. Shot all the pictures on the default settings. The camera has some features to adjust for lighting, sharpness and other characteristics, but I did not use these.
Took pictures at all three resolutions. The card holds about 200 high, 800 medium and well over 1,000 low resolution photos. The low resolution photos are fine for a computer monitor. The highest resolution photos are not as sharp as 35mm film, but they suit my purpose.
The camera downloads the photos to the computer in BMP format, which is very large, about 5 mb per picture. I use Paint Shop Pro from jasc.com for image editing. You can convert all the images from BMP to PNG with one command using the Batch Conversion feature. PNG is about 40% the size of BMP and does not lose any information. JPG reduces the size to about 25%, at lowest compression, but loses information, although I could not tell by eyeballing the photos.
You have to be careful about saving JPGs from JPGs, because each time, information is lost and the image gets worse. The best method is to always start with and never modify an original JPG image or use PNG or other compression that retains all the information.
Saved all the original images on CD in BMP format, because I had not discovered the Batch Conversion feature. Next time, I will save them as PNG. The 460 BMP images took 5 CDs, too much. PNG would take less than half, and JPG would fit on one. Wonder what the internal camera format is, because all the photos fit on the 256 mb compact flash, less than half the 640 mb of a single CD.
The digital camera is liberating. You still have to make sure you take pictures. A few rules to go by:
If the thought occurs to you that something would be a good picture, take it. Try to cover all the different types of things you do. Get the point? Shoot a lot of pictures. After 460 pictures, I can say, I should have taken more.
Dealing with all those photos takes time. In a file which I can import into a database, I listed each picture with the fields: date, rating, photographer, caption, people in the picture, city, state, country and notes. Did this right away so I would not forget what the pictures were about.
Named the images in such a way that I could write software to display them easily. For example, pictures displayed within pages have the width and height at the end of the name, so your web browser can layout the page before the image downloads. Large images have the same name as the smaller ones, without the width and height, so the software knows what large image to display when you click on a small one.