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Transferring photos from a camera to a computer is an often overlooked feature when making purchasing decisions. Digital cameras, like other peripherals, come with cables for this purpose. Buyers should make sure the cable is compatible with the port on their computers (virtually all computers made within the past two years have USB ports for peripheral connections, which provide faster data transfer than the older serial-port connections). Alternatively, card readers can be purchased that allow download of images directly from storage media.

	Photography: Kelly Blair (top); Canon (top and bottom left)
An intern at the Office of Mobile Design builds a model for the Portable House project. This picture was taken with a Canon Powershot S300. Canon’s Powershots (left) fit inside a shirt pocket

One widely lauded advantage of digital cameras is the ability to preview photographs instantly and delete those that turn out poorly. “By reusing a memory chip over and over, additional pictures are not as expensive. Throwing away images is less painful,” says George Papageorge, FAIA, principal of the Chicago-based firm Papageorge Haymes, who also notes, “There are no film costs or film-developing costs, and the time to get [photo] processing completed is reduced.”

For digital images, electronic manipulation takes the place of film development. Adobe’s Photoshop is an industry standard for this purpose, but many cameras are packaged with software with similar (though pared-down) functions for adjusting light levels, perspective, color, and other features. Papageorge encourages newcomers to learn how to use Photoshop or other image-editing software, since they replace the development techniques that allow photographers to control how the finished product looks. “The software requires training, but the beauty is, it’s not a chemical process. There are no toxicity problems and no light exposure problems,” he adds.

Finally, what to do with those hundreds of photos that were so easy to snap? Digital images are memory-hungry, and it’s critical to keep them from becoming a confusing mess of meaningless file names that clog a firm’s server or hard drives. Many companies offer free or fee-based Web hosting of digital photos, but for firms with large stocks of digital images that will be used again and again in various media, image-management software is designed to help users name, retrieve, and organize all types of digital media [record, March 2001, pages 164–70]. Investing a few hundred dollars in image-management software can save a great deal of effort down the road when organizing a digital-image library.

Will pixels trump film?

The ease, immediacy, and convenience of digital photography is seductive for neophytes of the medium, but experienced architects know that the mere ability to take photos rapidly does not make a good photographer, nor will it automatically produce the best-quality photographs. Papageorge, who’s taken presentation photographs of more than 50 of his firm’s projects since 1979, uses a film camera as well as a 3.34-megapixel Olympus C-3030 zoom digital camera, which he bought in 1999. “Digital photography does not replace the photography intellect, or eliminate the need for understanding the nature of photography in general,” he cautions. “It’s important to learn what fine photography is about. Take time to understand exposure compensations [for film], because there are still film-oriented settings in the image-capture portion of the digital process.”

While digital photography has a clear and growing role in architectural practice, it will never completely replace the film camera, especially for photographing completed projects. As Papageorge says, “The 4x5 camera is an architect’s best friend. It takes a lot of talent to get the best possible image out of it. It takes a pro. But with a digital camera, I can get close to 4x5 quality … just not all the time.”

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