By Jamie Douglas Whether you are a sedentary expat or the roving nomad, almost every new day brings different memories that may be worth preserving. With the advent of digital photography, the cost of preserving all your precious moments has come way down, allowing us to take more and better photos and videos. I have several hundred hours of video shot on Hi-8 tape, all organized and stored away. The fact is that all that video is way too complicated to view, even indexed as it all is, so my choice is the digital still camera.
Being a professional photographer I of course bought me a proper Nikon camera with all the right lenses, from fish eye to telephoto, with a very sharp macro lens to compliment the whole outfit, as well as that $800 computerized flash. It takes fabulous pictures, and lets me control all kinds of settings manually, including focus, which has been the problem with auto-focus cameras in low light or low contrast situations.
There are many excellent cameras available to the amateur these days which render incredible quality pictures. Now after spending thousand on my system, I also still use a 5 mega pixel Kodak, which has a wide range optical zoom lens, and it produces great images as well.
Depending on what you plan on doing with our photos, the amount of megapixels rendered is important only to a certain degree. Unless you plan on making posters out of your images, you rarely need to set your resolution to more than 5 MP, and even that is wasting a lot of memory on your card. When it comes to viewing pictures on your computer, you might be amazed at how good even very low-resolution images look.
Shop for Memory Cards Here
Memory is getting cheaper all the time as well. For example, an 8GB SanDisc memory card can be had for $5.00 so buying yourself a few is really the way to go as opposed to buying one very large memory card, such as the 32 GB card for close to $50. If however you want to shoot everything in the highest possible resolution, go for it. Just be sure to have a lot of empty space on your computer’s hard drive, or better yet, get a little external USB drive.
Shop for External Hard Drives Here
When it comes to getting a high quality digital camera in an affordable price range that offers amazing features and optics, you have to check out the Nikon L-120. $250 will get you an amazing array of features. With 14.1 MP and a 21x zoom that will blow you away, taking you from 25mm extreme wide angle all the way to 525mm telephoto, along with image stabilization and digital high definition video, this is likely to get you the biggest bang for your buck.
Of course, you will want to shop around the web to discover other amazing products in all price ranges. Should you have an interest in a diverse collection of Nikon equipment, used but in pristine condition, contact me for details jamie@expatdailynews.com.
Now assuming you are out there taking all those photos in hi-res or camera raw format (uncompressed raw JPEG images), you will have plenty of space on that 500 GB or 1 TB external drive to keep a couple of years worth of images, even shooting at a good clip. If you start a folder where you want to store some selected images to email to friends, there is a great program that is totally free to download and use. It is called Faststone Photo Resizer, and it is available here. It allows you to take your selected folder and downsize some or all of the images to an extremely emailable (new word) size. This same outfit also offers a great image viewer with almost Photoshop-like qualities, and it is many times better that the MS version built into Internet Explorer. It is available here as another freebie.
I love freeware! There is a lot of it out there. I have been using anti-virus freeware forever and have never once been infected or affected.
Happy snapping!
Jamie Douglas
Happy photo trails from San Rafael, Mendoza
Where that Fine Malbec Wine does not need a memory card!
I encourage you to write to me, jamie@expatdailynews.com with any questions or suggestions you may have, and if necessary, we can establish a voice communication via Skype. Disclaimer: I am not in any travel related business. My advice is based on my own experiences, and is free of charge. (Donations accepted). It is always my pleasure to act as a beneficial counselor to those who are seekers of the next adventure.
Jamie Douglas is an Adventurer, Writer and Photographer with an amazing array of Nikon equipment, and a lifetime of experience traveling and documenting. To contact him for assignments and new adventures, email: jamie.douglas [at] yahoo.com
See more expat articles by Jamie at
Expat Daily News Latin America.
We would love to hear your comments on this article email us at editor@expatdailynews.com If you liked this article and want to receive an email when new content is posted, simply enter your email address below. You will be asked to confirm your subscription before we send you any notifications. You can opt out of receiving emails from us at any time.
Back to Expat Daily News
Subscribe in a reader
Back to Expat Daily News
Subscribe in a reader
