Let’s admit that tripods are a pain to carry, set up, and use. The Quick Shot Artist principle is to avoid them whenever possible. Despite the pain, however, there are times when you just have to have one. They are like lawyers in that regard. I endured the trauma recently —picking a tripod, that is— and have some tips to pass along. I ended up with a three-part assembly from Manfrotto: an aluminum tripod, a ball leveler, and a pan-and-tilt head.

We’ve produced a twenty minute video tutorial on the basics of pocket cameras. It includes operation of the camera controls like the zoom and close-up mode, coping with batteries and memory chips, and the mechanics of downloading photos into Adobe Photoshop Elements™. It’s intended for people just getting into digital photography who need an orientation to what’s going on.

Many digital cameras come with free software for organizing and editing your photographs. That software is fine for casual users, but if you are a photo hobbyist advanced enough to, say, read a photo blog, then it’s best to invest in Adobe Photoshop Elements™. Elements was upgraded from version 6.0 to 7.0 last year, so you know it is a mature product. It comprises an organizer for filing and retrieving images and a photo editor for improving them. The basics are well-covered at this point, but I have some suggestions for improvements. These range from searching caption text to improved methods of resizing images, tagging, and making panoramas.

The effects of light on a subject depends upon the the positions of the subject, the camera, and the light source. I am fond of strong back lighting, which depends upon getting subject, camera, and light source carefully aligned. Set up correctly, back lighting has the potential of giving subjects the drama they deserve. Subjects like scrambled eggs or sorbet, for example. With a lightweight pocket camera and a small subject, the camera can be held in one hand and the subject in the other to very quickly get the lighting aligned.

We should be able to plug in the camera to a computer and use a software package designed to make the setup process easy, with help keys and online access to the manual and general reference materials. For example, setting up exposure bracketing on a Nikon D100 does not actually require a soldering iron, but it might be easier if it did. Instead, one might have the camera attached to a computer, access “bracketing” from a menu, and then be led through the process step by step.

Here I will quickly cover a few of the important features, and then get into a laundry list of secondary features that sometimes escape review. This camera has, for example, a built-in GPS receiver to tag images with location. It would be a mistake to buy a camera based on the secondary features, and I’ve never owned any camera that didn’t have a host of minor joys and minor pains. My job is to inform you of what is in store.

I noticed that in addition to playing video, the Playstation 3 claims to be able to display jpg image files. To try it out, I copied a bunch of jpgs onto the DVD burner in my PC. A bunch turned out to be 339 images, all left at full resolution and including vertical images and skinny panoramas.