Digital Photography
Photography has evolved considerably over the years and we are now living in the digital era. In place of cameras that used tedious rolls of film (which took only 20-30 photos per roll), we now have digital cameras which use sensors to convert what they see into electronic images which are then compressed and stored on a cameras memory card. These memory cards come in various sizes of memory (512MB, 1GB, 2GB, 4GB etc) and can literally store 100's even 1000's of pictures at once. Using special cables (usually supplied with your camera) you can then transfer your images from your camera to your computer to store them in mass. From here you can either print your favourite photos yourself or have them saved to a disc and printed at your local photo developers.
Basically digital photography is quicker, more efficient and offers far more capabilities to professional and amateur photographers.
Photo Editing Software
The beauty of having a digital camera is that you are able to buy special photo editing software (e.g. Photoshop, Photo Impact, Digital Image Suite, Photo Plus, Paint Shop Pro, Photo Studio, Photo Suite, Photo Explosion, Picture It etc) which enables you to manipulate and change your images. Not only can you rotate, resize or crop, but you can also change images colours, adjust brightness, contrast or even merge pictures together.
You can even build electronic photograph albums that can be viewed on your computer and have them copied to a DVD disc which can then be displayed on your TV as a slideshow, using your DVD player.
Photos in JPEG Format
JPEG's stands for "Joint Photographic Experts Group", and is the file format in which most digital cameras compresses and stores images to its memory card. The compression method in which JPEG's use causes the image to lose a fraction of the images quality, but still produces pictures to a high standard or quality.
Raw Images
When a digital camera makes an exposure the imaging chip (whether it's CCD or CMOS) records the amount of light that has hit each pixel, or photo site. This is recorded as a voltage level. The camera's analogue to digital circuitry now changes this analogue voltage signal into a digital representation. Depending on the camera's circuitry either 12 or 14 bits of data are recorded.