On this trip our principal cameras were two Olympus C-2100UZ digital cameras. The UZ stands for ultra-zoom, a tag used because the camera has a zoom lens that has a 10 power range. As a wide angle lens, it is equivalent to a 37mm lens on a 35mm camera, while at full zoom it corresponds to 370mm, a very long telephoto. Those long telephotos are hard to hold steady and sharp pictures are generally only possible in bright sunlight when you can use a high shutter speed. The C-2100UZ overcomes this difficulty by incorporating a mechanical stabilization device in the lens. This device uses tiny gyroscopes to detect movement of the camera and adjusts the optics to compensate (within limits).

I used an Olympus B-300 teleconverter lens occasionally to extend the telephoto reach by 1.4 to the equivalent of a 510mm stabilized lens. This was useful to take detailed pictures of mountain tops or other places that I simply could not get close enough to photograph.

In addition many pictures were taken with a Minolta DImage Xi which was added to our equipment for two reasons. First, it's tiny: It fits easily in a pocket. I could carry it about with me on the ship, or in a port and always have the ability to capture an image that struck my fancy. Second, it has an underwater housing, so I can take it with me snorkeling.

The DImage Xi is a three megapixel camera with a three times optical zoom. It uses Secure Digital memory cards. I purchased a single 256MB card, and this allows me to take over 300 high resolution pictures before I have to download them to the computer. This came in handy on the four-day overland excursion to Machu Picchu because I had decided to leave the laptop on the ship. Disk drives work by "flying" the head above the disk surface on a thin film of air. I was concerned that using the laptop at 11,300 ft. might risk a disk crash since the atmosphere is thinner.

For links to digital photography sites on the web, please refer to my digital photography links page at http://www.peacham.com/travel/photography.htm

Photo editing

We did our best to get the image just as we saw it, but that wasn't always exact. With digital photography you can do quite a bit of fixing up on your computer back home. Here are some examples:

Procedure	Before	After
Exposure correction
Increase contrast, remove color bias.
Cropping, perspective removal
Remove haze
Panorama making (combining multiple shots)

The pictures that we took were all 2 or three megapixels, but in order to make it convenient for people to download them without losing too much detail, I decided on a web size of 1024 x 768 and a higher degree of compression. So, for each picture, here are the steps I performed:

1. Open the original in Adobe Photoshop Elements from the hard drive or CD
2. If necessary rotate and apply perspective correction.
3. Adjust the exposure using one or more of the following tools:
   • Levels - To eliminate haze and improve the contrast
   • Fill Flash - To brighten up dark areas without affecting highlights
   • Layers - to separate sections of the image in order to treat them differently
   • Adjustment Layers and other tools in Photoshop Elements
4. Crop the image to concentrate on the subject and resize to 1024 maximum dimension
5. Apply the Unsharp mask filter to make it look sharper.
6. Save it under a new name in the web site directory using Save for Web.
7. Create the thumbnail.