Creating a Digital Photo Archive for academic use, using a Nikon D50 Camera ...

[igmolinav]

Hi,

I intend to create a Digital Photo Archive using a Nikon D50 camera.

The Photos taken will be shown in two ways. One way will be in presentations or lectures made in Power Point, and the other way will be projecting the photos by themselves.

The camera is new, and it lets me choose "the quality(size, weight, you name it)" I may want to give to the pictures. With a 1GB memory card I can get as many pictures as follows:

NEF=(RAW+JPEG) - Around 114
JPEG Fine - Around 272
JPEG Norm - Around 590
JPEG Basic - Around 990

The question is which one do you use. I just don´t want to "overfill" the hard drive with unnecessary GB space, but I would still like the images to be sharp enough when projected.

Thank you very much,

igmolinav
igmolinav@yahoo.de

 

[gammamonk]

Jpeg high is generally the way to go if you ask me. Some people insist that you should have the highest possible quality, and they use RAW. But 99% of people probably can't tell the difference. Especially once printed. RAW does offer a few photoshop advantages, but for general shooting, I think you'll be fine.

 

[BanjoBanker]

Jpeg high is generally the way to go if you ask me. Some people insist that you should have the highest possible quality, and they use RAW. But 99% of people probably can't tell the difference. Especially once printed. RAW does offer a few photoshop advantages, but for general shooting, I think you'll be fine.

This is spot on. The NEF files are huge and require post production work to make them useable. If you are not going to print the prictures any larger that 8x10, you could use the medium setting with good results.

 

[Abstract]

There's no point taking photos in RAW unless you plan on post processing. If you don't, the photos won't be as good as a jpeg. If you do post processing, they'll be better. RAW also has a larger dynamic range than taking photos as jpegs by like 2 stops or something. Also, they're 12-bit as opposed to JPEGs , which are 8-bit.

I doubt you'd notice a difference between JPEG Fine and JPEG Normal either.

If all you're going to do is project your images through a projector and put them into PP presentation slides, you can get away with taking JPEGs under medium size and fine quality. Even at medium size, you're going to have an approximately 4 MP image anyway using a D50. If you need to crop a photo, you're better off taking photos at large size to get all the pixels you can, but if not, then medium is still quite good. Lots of cameras that are 4 MP still take great photos, such as my point and shoot.

 

[ChrisA]

For your use "JPG Fine" is about right. You will find that most images can be improved somewat by minor post production work. If nothing else you will likely need to crop the images. The D50 capures images with a 3:2 aspect ratio which may not match your projector or the space inside the slide. SD cards are cheap now about $30 each. Don't worry about filing them up. Later on the computer you can toss most of the ones that are not "keepers"

If you intend to do much post processing shoot NEF (raw) this give Photoshop a lot more data to work with and allows for a greater rage of adjustment. Raw is best any time you know the lighting is tricky mixed color ilumination (Flourecent and sunlight) or a high dynamic range. But for most images JPG is ok.