Opinions on Win 97 please

[Bruce_in_Oz]

Just a hint, to get more detailed pix of dark objects, like blued guns, go with a mid grey background and avoid using a camera-mounted flash.

Outside, in the shade, weather, (and nosey neighbours) permitting is good.

If you have no tripod etc, and must use the flash, stick a couple of layers of thin tissue paper over the camera-mounted flash "window", a few millimetres away from the lens. This will diffuse and "damp" the flash and reduce bright spots and other weird reflections.

A lot of digital cameras can be cheerfully "fooled" into doing what you want by playing with the nominal "ASA / ISO "rating". As long as you can keep the camera still for duration of the "shutter speed", things will be good. Good cameras can also be set to "compensate" on the fly by means of an "offset" feature that applies under or over-exposure to your specification. Sometimes referred to as "backlight compensation".

The beauty of digital is that you can experiment for days, and all you have burned is a bit of time and annoyed a lot of electrons, as opposed to the "good old days". Back then, you had to shoot FILM that was non "re-usable" and cost real money and time before you even saw what you had captured. REALLY hard-core types made it a practice to "bracket" EVERY SHOT, i.e., shoot the pic three times; once at what the camera said was the correct exposure, and then once each at one stop under and one stop over. This was because of the non-linearity of the sensitized layer on the film.

Then there was the analogue "photoshop"; the darkroom.

More memories of a mis-spent youth.....

However, now you can lose hundreds of hi-res pics of holidays, family etc, if you misplace a plastic chip the size of your thumbnail. Furthermore, when some great-great-grand-chld finds said plastic chip in a shoe-box in a hundred years time, will the technology to read it still exist?

Roundabouts and swings, apparently.

Nice-looking '97, BTW.