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toddmc

Jul 13, 2004, 1:27 PM

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Digital Camera / Internet Cafe ?

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Hello

We are planning to spend 3 weeks in Mexico starting mid October.
With that in mind, we are also thinking about purchasing a digital camera before we go.

My concern is as follow.

While I have used internet cafes in Mexico for surfing, I wonder if I will be able to find internet cafes that I will be able to hook my camera up at and download my photos to a storage area on the internet. or will I just have to buy large amounts of storage media to carry with me?

Or should I just stick with a traditional camera and maybe go digital some other time.

on our last 2 week trip we shot 12 rolls of 36 shot fill so I would expect to shoot up to 20 rolls on this next trip.

Thanks

Todd and Shannon

*************************
Our new life in Patzcuaro: http://lifeinthecorazon.blogspot.com

(This post was edited by toddmc on Jul 13, 2004, 1:32 PM)

johanson / Moderator

Jul 13, 2004, 7:26 PM

Post #2 of 16 (1037 views)

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Re: [toddmc] Digital Camera / Internet Cafe ?

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I cant speak for the rest of Mexico but Ajijic and Guadalaja have internet cafes that can do all of the what you want, along with just as many that are mom and pop operations that won't let you do much more than surf the net

Here in Ajijic I know there is one next to Domino's Pizza (just East of Town) and one across the street from Telmex in Ajijic in the CIA coffee Shop. They are on the first floor of a two story building with all kinds of antennas on them. But you would expect that with the CIA wouldn't you.

Oh the CIA stands for Cafe Internet Ajijic and the antennas are part of their ISPs fixed WiFi operation

hoping 2

Jul 22, 2004, 11:42 AM

Post #3 of 16 (1006 views)

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Re: [johanson] Digital Camera / Internet Cafe ?

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Go digital! I am absolutely in love with digital especially while traveling. I take as many photos as you do and my digital camera has made it a joy. I have access to my photos almost immediately, don't have to carry film and can play around with them afterward. At first I wasn't too savy about the computer and internet, so I bought media cards that could hold more than enough until my return home. Now I'm so addicted, I carry a laptop to download ( allowing no need for the internet) when I return to the hotel.

tfyoung

Jul 22, 2004, 5:26 PM

Post #4 of 16 (993 views)

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Re: [hoping 2] Digital Camera / Internet Cafe ?

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I second (or third) the motion for digital. My family took a two week drive that included several days in Ajijic in May. We took loads more pictures with the digital camera than we would have with a film camera. We were traveling with laptops, so we downloaded them to the laptop every couple of days. We have a 64 mb memory stick and we never came close to filling it up. Again, we were downloading every day or two. But memory is getting cheaper. I would investigate more memory in case you get in a situation where you can't unload. Or bring a laptop. It was a lot of fun having a slide show of the day's activities after we got back to the hotel.

By the way, here is a link to some of our pictures. We only have 10 mb of web space, so this is only a fraction of what we took. http://bellsouthpwp.net/t/f/tfyoung/ I put this out there mostly to share the pictures with my family, so these might not be that interesting to anybody else.

kirkswig

Jul 22, 2004, 6:31 PM

Post #5 of 16 (981 views)

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Re: [tfyoung] Digital Camera / Internet Cafe ?

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I third (or fourth) the motion for digital. I'm moving to Mazatlan in a week; I spent a week there about a month ago, and for the first time in my life I regretted not having a camera.

So when I came back to U.S. one of the first things I did was get a digital camera. Got myself a Canon Powershot S410. This thing is sooooooooooo cool. I don't know the first thing about photography, yet all I have to do is point and click and I'm taking really decent photos! I can plug the camera into my Mac laptop and the photos are automatically uploaded (downloaded?) so I can view them, right there, or shrink them (to send to friends, otherwise they're quite large), crop them, I can do all kinds of stuff.

There were so many funny sights in Mexico that were made bittersweet because I wasn't able to record them. My favorite was when I saw a man and his child riding on one of those four-wheel motorcycles. Of course in Mexico, only one rider needs to wear a helmet, and you'll sometimes see whole families on a scooter, where, in obeyance of the law, only one rider is wearing a helmet. However, in this case, both the man and his son were wearing helmets. Why do I find that amusing? Because the four-wheel motorcycle was in the bed of a pickup truck that was stopped at a red light!

I don't know, I guess you had to be there. A truly charming scene, and I missed capturing it for posterity, all because I didn't have one of these really cool cameras.

Well, no more! The other great thing about these cameras is that they're really small. Mine's about the size of a pack of cigarettes, maybe a little fatter. The plan is to carry the thing with me in a pocket or one of those hipsacks(?) I keep seeing people wearing, so it's at the ready when the next memorable scene comes my way.

If you go ahead and purchase one, I'd recommend getting a bigger memory card. Mine came with a 32MB card, which you'd think would be really big, and it is, but these pictures are huge! Mine's a 4MP (four mega-pixel) camera, so every picture I take ends up being something like 2MB when JPEG-encoded. So we're talking maybe 16 pictures before I run out of memory, which isn't bad, because I can always download (upload?) them to my laptop at the end of the day, but still, I'd hate to be made to miss a picture because I ran out of space. In hindsight, I should've gone for less mega-pixels. I mean, 4MP pictures are HUGE, we're talking about pictures that are 2272x1704 pixels. In comparison, most computer monitors do 1280x1024 or so. My monitor does 1600x1200, and still I have to scroll to see the whole picture. Who needs pictures that big?

There's also an aesthetic factor here. I took a close-up picture of my brother recently, and it wasn't a terribly bad shot, and he's a fairly decent looking dude, but when you blow the picture up, every little imperfection in his skin, including pimples and wrinkles (and don't tell him I said this, but gray hairs) is recorded in perfect digital clarity. Seriously, who amongst us really wants to be photographed using these things? Point one my way and you'll probably want to set the camera for a fast shutter speed, because I'm running in the opposite direction. And I might be tubby, but baby, I can really scoot when I need to.

Another feature in these cameras (at least in mine, maybe not yours, I don't know) is that it lets you actually take motion pictures. I haven't used it yet, as the documentation is rather intimidating, but it sounds like it could be really useful, and I'm sure it can only benefit from having lots of memory. I was taking a bus to the Golden Zone in Mazatlan once, and for most of the trip you're riding adjacent to the ocean. Mazatlan has pelicans like New York City has pigeons. I like pigeons well enough, but pelicans are cooler. Especially when you're hanging out the window of a bus and a pelican is gliding maybe 10 feet above you on a course and at a speed approximately that of the bus. If I had taken a motion picture of that, I'd be hanging a genius sign on my door right about now.

Alas, all I could do was applaud. Again, I guess you had to be there.

You can get flash memory cards as big as 2GB if you want to. It costs more than the camera probably will, but then we're talking about the ability to take an insanely huge amount of photos in a single session, somewhere around a thousand I guess. That's like being out all day (16 hours) taking a 4MP picture every minute. Crazy. But it's really, really cool that you can do that if you want to.

As a kid I always thought that I'd be driving flying cars in the 21st century, or taking that Pan Am Shuttle to the moon, like Stanley Kubrick (sort of) promised us. It's sort of disappointing that none of that stuff has made it into reality. However, there is a lot of cool stuff that has made it to shelves, and I think the digital camera is at or near the top of that list.

To boldly go where no wig has gone before.

Jul 22, 2004, 7:37 PM

Post #6 of 16 (975 views)

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Re: [kirkswig] Digital Camera / Internet Cafe ?

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Quote

"kirkswig" writes:
....In hindsight, I should've gone for less mega-pixels. I mean, 4MP pictures are HUGE, we're talking about pictures that are 2272x1704 pixels. In comparison, most computer monitors do 1280x1024 or so. My monitor does 1600x1200, and still I have to scroll to see the whole picture. Who needs pictures that big?....

If you examine the manual that accompanied the camera you'll find that you can change the resolution ("number of mega-pixels") that each image is recorded at. Alternately, when read into many photo-editing programs, you can change the resolution of the image (or better yet a copy thereof) after the fact.

Personally I opt for higher density storage media and take my images at the highest possible resolution the camera is capable of. That way you can crop the image after the fact, removing unwanted items around the periphery or even to change the focus and theme of the image to one element present in the original, without the new image becoming too grainy.

Quote

There's also an aesthetic factor here. I took a close-up picture of my brother recently, and it wasn't a terribly bad shot, and he's a fairly decent looking dude, but when you blow the picture up, every little imperfection in his skin, including pimples and wrinkles (and don't tell him I said this, but gray hairs) is recorded in perfect digital clarity.

Whether you're seeing an actual and true image is open to question. The CCD elements of digital cameras are notorious for introducing noise, jitter, grain, and texture. Again a photo editing program can remove these elements rendering what you may consider to be a more realistic or even flattering image. For a frightening example of the power of digital editing of the human image, look at Kevin Ames' recently released Adobe Photoshop CS: The Art of Photographing Women.

Rolly

Jul 22, 2004, 8:00 PM

Post #7 of 16 (969 views)

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Re: [ET] Digital Camera / Internet Cafe ?

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If you are serious about digital photography, you'll find that the quality of the camera is only the first half of the story. You will need a good photo editing program. And you'll need to spend a good bit of time learning to use the program. In fact the software will require a longer learning curve than the camera. When I was a lad, I had my own darkroom; now I consider the software my darkroom without chemicals. I have been using PhotoShop for several years, and I still have things to earn. But it sure is worth the effort to get the best out of digital photos.

Rolly Pirate

kirkswig

Jul 22, 2004, 9:24 PM

Post #8 of 16 (960 views)

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Re: [ET] Digital Camera / Internet Cafe ?

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If you examine the manual that accompanied the camera you'll find that you can change the resolution ("number of mega-pixels") that each image is recorded at.

You are correct. It's on page 55. Thanks.

Part of the reason I find the documentation so intimidating is because of all of these weird icons they're using, both on the camera and in the documentation itself. I have a Mac background, so I'm used to icons, where they often made sense. But the icons being used in this camera are truly bewildering. I'm sure I just need to take the time out to really apply myself to learning how to use the thing. I'm sure it's worth it. I just haven't had the time, yet.

Quote

Alternately, when read into many photo-editing programs, you can change the resolution of the image (or better yet a copy thereof) after the fact.

But of course, that doesn't do anything for the problem of pictures taking up so much memory when originally taken. And now that you've prodded me into reading the documentation again, I see that there is such a thing as a raw image, that isn't JPEG-encoded, and which will take up something like 4MB per picture. Yikes!

Of course, it's very nice to know that that ability is there, if you need it. When examining some of these pictures up close I've seen more than a few examples where the JPEG-encoding has gone awry. For some pictures I'm sure that I'd much rather control how the compression is performed myself.

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Personally I opt for higher density storage media and take my images at the highest possible resolution the camera is capable of. That way you can crop the image after the fact, removing unwanted items around the periphery or even to change the focus and theme of the image to one element present in the original, without the new image becoming too grainy.

Yeah, I'm pretty such this is what I'm going to do to. I've got my eye on a 256MB memory card which should enable exactly that. I'll set the camera to raw mode (no JPEG-encoding) and handle all the images on my computer. I don't have Photoshop though (can't afford it just yet), so I guess I'll spend the remainder of my life learning The Gimp. (groan)

I had a learning edition of Photoshop, Photoshop LE or SE or something like that, but it looks like I'm going to have to give it up since my copy only runs on Window, which I'm probably abandoning in favor of Mac as a result of the move south.

To boldly go where no wig has gone before.

kirkswig

Jul 22, 2004, 9:33 PM

Post #9 of 16 (959 views)

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Re: [Rolly] Digital Camera / Internet Cafe ?

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I've used a learning edition of Photoshop (or maybe it was a demo version, I don't know), and I will say that I'm very impressed with the program. But I can't afford it just now, especially when it isn't clear to me yet whether I'm going to be running Mac or Windows once I arrive in Mexico (customs will be making that determination for me :))

The Gimp is said to be the open-source equivalent of Photoshop, but like all open-source equivalents, it is undoubtedly lacking in features. That said, it is open source, which beyond meaning that it's free, means that it should eventually catch up to Photoshop in terms of functionality, and perhaps even surpass it.

That said, it's fairly difficult to use. I thought I could just jump in with the limited Photoshop experience I had under my belt and do real damage to images. No such luck. I just get frustrated.

I guess I'm going to have to try harder, because I do believe what you say is correct: the camera is only the first half of the story.

Money can't buy you everything.

To boldly go where no wig has gone before.

Jul 22, 2004, 9:49 PM

Post #10 of 16 (955 views)

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Re: [kirkswig] Digital Camera / Internet Cafe ?

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"kirkswig" writes:
...I had a learning edition of Photoshop, Photoshop LE or SE or something like that, but it looks like I'm going to have to give it up since my copy only runs on Window, which I'm probably abandoning in favor of Mac as a result of the move south.....

Based on the Photoshop image manipulation engine but outfitted with a simplified and less production environment-oriented user interface, Adobe Photoshop Elements can be found for less than $100 retail. It runs under MacOS X and 9.x, as well as various flavors of Windows. For the currently shipping version (2.0x) both Mac flavors and the Windows version are shipped on the same CD.

Particularly if you plan to perform electronic image editing, RAW format is definitely the way to go. Also compare the identical RAW and JPEG-encoded image and see how much of what you were describing earlier as pimples and wrinkles in perfect digital clarity are actually encoding artifacts.

kirkswig

Jul 22, 2004, 10:14 PM

Post #11 of 16 (949 views)

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Re: [ET] Digital Camera / Internet Cafe ?

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Oh yes, I'm such a dummy... I've heard of this already!

Let me see which of my computers arrrives intact (ie., not confiscated by customs) in Mexico, and I'll make my decision accordingly. I don't see myself requiring the full ooomph of Photoshop CS. I think I'm basically looking at being able to crop and to choose quality settings for JPEG-encoding, though I've yet to experiment with taking pictures without flash, and I'm sure that requires a different set of tools altogether.

The geek (and cheapskate) in me says "go with The Gimp", but the "get it done" side says, get Photoshop (regardless of the version.)

Thanks for your good input.

To boldly go where no wig has gone before.

mkdutch

Jul 23, 2004, 2:21 PM

Post #12 of 16 (916 views)

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Re: [kirkswig] Digital Camera / Internet Cafe ?

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One thing about RAW images. This is not a "standard" format. Different brands of cameras produce different raw formats. I have a minolta a1, and its raw format is not recognized by Photoshop Elements, although I believe it is recognized in Photoshop CS. When i take a raw image (about 7 meg), I then have to open it up in the Minolta software, and save it as a TIFF image (28 meg), which I can then open in Photoshop Elements. This is time consuming when using my old, slow laptop. Even the desktop is a little sluggish with this activity. So unless I am shooting something that I think I will want to print at 8x10 or larger, I just use the highest quality jpeg for capture. Much easier for me to work with, and I can get twice as many pictures on my camera flash card.

Kay

Jul 23, 2004, 5:29 PM

Post #13 of 16 (904 views)

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Re: [kirkswig] Digital Camera / Internet Cafe ?

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"kirkswig" writes:
....The geek (and cheapskate) in me says "go with The Gimp", but the "get it done" side says, get Photoshop (regardless of the version.)....

On the Mac side of things, another option would be to start off by using iPhoto, which has shipped free of charge with most new Macs in the past 3 or so years. The current version of iPhoto has excellent photo management capabilities, continued one-click access to photo printing services (not usable in Mexico unless you have a US shipping address for the prints/books), and basic photo editing and retouching capabilities. If you decide you actually enjoy intensive photo editing and retouching you can spring for some flavor of Photoshop, for which because of the plug-ins available (some of which are truely amazing - redoing a low-light photo as if a flash had been used at the time of the photo....) there's really no competition.

kirkswig

Jul 23, 2004, 7:35 PM

Post #14 of 16 (897 views)

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Re: [mkdutch] Digital Camera / Internet Cafe ?

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Yeah, I found this out the hard way. iPhoto on my Mac Powerbook won't deal with RAW images... the docs say I have to install the Canon software to work with this.

(my laptop is kinda old too... 4 years old to be exact, so I can relate.)

I'll try to get it all sorted out once I arrive next week and I'm able to catch my breath.

However, giving it some more thought, I'm thinking that I may start saving images in RAW format after all. The camera has a 4X zoom, which is handy, but I was initially concerned that some of my photos could have benefitted from a higher zoom. But... if I were taking RAW images, then I could just crop and display the remaining image at full resolution and get a pretty decent picture. It's almost like there's a ZOOM builtin to the format, if you get my meaning.

I guess I could do this with JPEG too, but there is quite a bit of loss. I think that in some of the more extreme examples it would really reduce image quality some.

I'll just have to get a bigger flash memory card. :)

To boldly go where no wig has gone before.

kirkswig

Jul 23, 2004, 7:48 PM

Post #15 of 16 (896 views)

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Re: [ET] Digital Camera / Internet Cafe ?

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Yup, I'm using a Mac, and iPhoto is pretty cool, but if you read my reply to mkdutch, my thinking is that I'm going to want to start taking RAW images, and I don't think iPhoto supports importing those from the camera.

So having given it some thought, and listening to all these excellent suggestions, I think the plan now is to at least try using The GIMP. On the Mac, FINK makes installing The GIMP pretty straightforward. I see that Powell's is selling Grokking The Gimp so that's probably going to be the first book I buy from Mexico. While I've little doubt that PhotoShop is the superior product (esp. CS), I've got quite a bit of experience writing computer code, so the advantage for me is that I might be able to make changes to The GIMP to better suit whatever I'm looking to do.

Also, I'm trying these days to be as operating system agnostic as I can be, with an eye towards eventually running everything under Linux. Photoshop isn't available for Linux, whereas I can run The GIMP on Windows, Mac, or Linux (or any of the *BSD's too I think.)

To boldly go where no wig has gone before.

sfmacaws

Aug 3, 2004, 12:01 AM

Post #16 of 16 (850 views)

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Re: [kirkswig] Digital Camera / Internet Cafe ?

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Here's one way to deal with lossy compression and incompatible file types. I set my camera to the largest resolution possible but in jpeg format. When I move the pics to my laptop the first thing I do is run a script that saves them all as photoshop (lossless)- TIFF would work just as well. Any work I do on them I do in that format which does not degrade the pic, I then save them to the size I want as a jpeg and keep the original .psd file. I can go back and make other sizes, crop, filter, etc. without compression loss. I also save the original so that I can always make a new .psd copy to work on. This has come in handy as I've changed the size and format I want for web pages.

There is a slight loss when the camera saves the pic to jpeg but it is more than compensated for by the high resolution of the picture. As long as you don't change anything and save on a jpeg you will lose nothing, all changes should be made on a lossless copy.

I've used photoshop for years and find it irreplaceable but there is a long learning curve and as Rolly said, there is always something new to learn about it. About a year ago, I discovered I could record info about the pic and embed it in a .psd image that could then be used in specific places in a web gallery script. Amazing, I just never noticed that command before but now I use it to do all of my web galleries and it is great. I put descriptions, dates, titles on each pic and then combine them into web galleries with one click. Because I save the .psd files of all my pics I also have better, more personal, information about each of them than what the camera puts in.

I haven't looked at Gimp so I don't know how full featured it is but my guess is that since photoshop is such a standard and so important to many, Gimp will be a close cousin in most ways. Of course, like most monopolies except Microsoft, one of the joys of Adobe products is that they all work extremely well together and the interface is so standard that it makes learning a new Adobe product much easier. I also use GoLive and ImageReady and they integrate with PS flawlessly. I also use them in two OS's, XP and OSX, and files move back and forth with few glitches, another kudo for Adobe.

Jonna - Mérida, Yucatán