Tute Two

Tutorial Two: Digital Camera use and applications

“A new technology is rarely superior to an old one in every feature”. Briefly discuss this statement in relation to digital camera technology. What would you consider to be some of the pluses and minuses digital camera technology holds in relation to more traditional film based cameras?
The new digital camera’s great benefit is the ability to take hundreds of photographs with limited problems such as, limit of photos, battery, and time. This benefit and the nature of a digital camera means that people take many more unnecessary photographs, which means an overload of unnecessary information. The other thing about digital camera is that the convenience is loading them onto the computer and not necessarily printing them off, this can mean though, that people have no printed photos but rather electronic photos which are harder to access and often are lost because of technological failure.


List some of the ways that digital images can be stored transferred and manipulated using other communications technology.
Digital images can be sent to people via the internet emailing system. This means that a family member across the world can be instantly shown a picture of a new grandchild or a wedding. Digital images can also be loaded onto the internet as an information source open to all people and can aid in teaching about a subject or sharing news more accurately with a photograph of the immediate happenings.

Given the prevalence of image capturing devices, and thinking about the issues discussed in tutorial one, consider what sort of ethical issues may arise with their use.
Digital cameras are very widely used. This leads to the ethical consideration, who/ what are people allowed to take pictures of, and if there are rules, how can they be policed? A tourist may take a photo of a person in a country, just going around their daily business, and may post this picture on a web site to show his friends. That person may feel their privacy has been breached, but the tourist may not think that that is the case. Who is to judge, and what can be done about it?

Briefly discuss some of the ways that digital images could, or are, being used in occupational therapy practice.
On my second placement in the acute burns and plastic ward, my supervisor used a digital camera to help her in her practice. She used it in her out patient scar management clinic, to have a visual memory of what a clients scar looked like a few weeks ago and how it was progressing. This made her clinical judgements and treatments a lot more accurate.

Provide a brief summary of the services offered by Flickr.com
“Flickr is an image and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community platform. It was one of the earliest Web 2.0 applications. In addition to being a popular Web site for users to share personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers as a photo repository. Its popularity has been fueled by its organization tools, which allow photos to be tagged and browsed by folksonomic means. As of November 2007, it hosts more than two billion images.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flickr

Name one other photo storage website which offers a service similar to Flickr.com
Facebook

Explain what the difference is between a digital and an optical zoom
Digital zoom basically just crops and enlarges an already captured image where as optical zoom magnifies the image.

Explain what is meant by the term mega pixel
A mega pixel is one million pixels often used to describe the amount of pixels in an image, or the amount of digital display elements in a camera.