Digital Photography: What's New & Exciting Right Now? (Part 1 of 3)

Two Obvious Trends

When most people think about digital cameras and trends in digital photography, they usually think about megapixels and price. Digital cameras are coming with more and more megapixels, and the same features are becoming available at lower prices.

For example, when my sister-in-law wanted to buy a new digital camera, her first question was: "how many megapixels should I get?"

I'm not saying that this is not a valid question. It is.

However, once you get to 10 or 12 megapixels, that's probably sufficient. Beyond that, you get diminishing returns -- and you fill up your hard disk a LOT faster. (Photos from my 12 megapixel Nikon D300 camera are almost twice the file size as those from my 10 megapixel Canon Rebel XTi!)

Five Exciting Trends

In fact, there are now five more interesting -- and little-known -- trends that Jim and I believe are already starting to transform digital photography, and will continue to have an even bigger impact on your photographs over the next several years.

In short, they will easily let you take MUCH better photographs.

These five trends are:

1. Noise Reduction

2. Geotagging (GPS)

3. High Dynamic Range (HDR)

4. Smarter Focusing

5. Photo Sharing.

We believe these trends will be much more important in the next few years than than just having more megapixels or lower priced cameras.

Let's talk about each of these trends, and more importantly, what this trend means for you.

1. Noise Reduction

One of the biggest problems in photography is not having enough light to take great pictures, especially indoors or at night.

There are several ways to compensate -- for example, flash, a slower shutter speed, a wider aperture, or a higher ISO -- but each of these can create other problems.

Recently, Nikon introduced two new cameras, the D3 and D300, that go a long way to solving this problem. (In fact, this is the main reason I got a D300 for my birthday.)

Nikon has focused on reducing the noise -- or grain -- at higher ISO levels, so you can take good quality pictures at ISO 1600 and even 3200. That means that you can take MUCH better pictures in low light situations.

There is now better specialized noise reduction software you can use to help solve this problem as well.

What this means for you: Over time, we predict more cameras and software will incorporate these features automatically, so it will become easier and easier to get great photos when there is poor light.

2. Geotagging (GPS)

Geotagging is the process of adding geographical information, like latitude and longitude coordinates, to a photograph. It's like having GPS in your camera.

Geotagging can be useful to help other people identify exactly where a photo was taken. For example, we've photographed many waterfalls in the Blue Ridge and Great Smokey mountains. It would be handy to know exactly where each photo was taken -- either for us, if we want to go back to a specific waterfall, or for others who also might be interested in photographing that waterfall.

Today, we own a special Ricoh camera that does geotagging -- the Richoh 500SE -- so we were able to geotag these waterfalls. However, this is not an inexpensive solution. Some cameras use Bluetooth to get the geotagging information from your GPS.

Here's another more dramatic example. When we were in Southern California last October, we rented a boat and went up the coast a short distance. Below is a photo of seals taken with the Ricoh from the boat near the Santa Monica Peer.

I imported this picture into Adobe Lightroom, and it automatically included the longitude and latitude (look at the GPS setting at bottom of this screen capture).

When you click on the arrow to the right of the GPS setting, it automatically opens Google Maps to that location. You can see how accurate it is -- it even shows where we were on the water! If you click on the map below, you can go to the live Google Maps page. Pretty cool...

What this means for you: In the future, we predict many cameras will have geotagging built in. It will be fun to have the latitude and longitude coordinates (or even altitude information) of your photos, automatically linked with Google Maps.

Tomorrow we'll talk about the next trend that is transforming digital photography. It's one of my favorites. Stay tuned...