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This was our first trip where we depended completely on digital photography. We used two cameras both of which produce 2 megapixel images. I prefer this resolution because it makes the images smaller, so I can fit more on each memory card, but still has enough detail that, if I wanted, I could print out an acceptable 8" x 10" picture. Most of the pictures on this web side were resized or cropped down to 1024x768 to reduce download time. We had a major scare right at the beginning: the power supply that I brought along for the Fotoshow ZIP drive was labeled as 110/220 volts, but when I plugged it in to 220 volts it started smelling funny and stopped working. That's when I found the tiny hidden switch that selected between 110 and 220. Without that transformer we would be unable to run the ZIP drive to copy the pictures from the memory cards. This, in turn, meant that we could only take about 300 pictures before the memory cards that we had along were completely full. I grabbed our guide and we went to a large Beijing department store where I was able to purchase a 220v to 12v DC power supply to replace the burnt out one. It worked fine and saved the trip for us. Actually, I was not too worried since the original power supply was made in China (as were most of our clothes, shoes, etc.). The cameras both operate off 4 AA batteries. I use 1600 milliamp-hour Nickel Metal-Hydride (NiMH) rechargeable cells and carry three spare sets around with me so that we will never run out of power. Most of the time these cameras would go all day on a single set of batteries, but some days, such as the Li river tour out of Guilin, I had to put in a fresh set about the time the first 64MB chip got full. The battery chargers would recharge the batteries in about four hours. For information about digital photography, I recommend Digital Photo Review (http://www.dpreview.com/) run by Phil Askey. Here you will find news, reviews, and discussions on all aspects of digital photography. Olympus C-2100 Ultrazoom
It works very well in automatic mode but has an extensive set of manual features allowing you to gain much more control over things such as exposure, white balance, focus, flash, depth of field, etc. In my opinion this is the finest camera currently available for the type of photography that I do. After using it on the trip, Marie decided that she wanted one for her birthday. I discovered that Olympus is discontinuing this model in favor of one that is more compact but doesn't have stabilization. Luckily I bought the last C-2100 a local dealer had in stock, and at a very good price. Happy Birthday Marie! Update October 1, 2002
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 | It only works with NTSC TV sets as found in North America, no ability to switch to PAL or SECAM. |
| It can take up to an hour to look at a day's worth of pictures and build thumbnails for them. It must accomplish this before you can display a single picture. |
| The thumbnails use up disk space that you might want to use for pictures. Tough: no way to delete them. |
| It is SLOW. |
| The menus are difficult to navigate. If you are looking at a picture and decide to delete it, you have to go all the way out to the top menu to select the delete function. |
| There is an editing function that applies way too much compression to its results and destroys picture quality. |
But you don't have to use the TV interface. Just copy your cards to ZIP disk every evening, and you can start each day with plenty of room for new pictures.
You do your best to get the exact image that you want, but it isn'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 |  |
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| Color enhancement |  |
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| Increase contrast (remove haze) |  |
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| Color correction, cropping, perspective removal |  |
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| Removing extraneous Japanese tourists |  |
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| Panorama making (combining four or five shots) |  |
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The pictures that I took were all around 1600 x 1200 pixels, 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. So, for each picture, here are the steps I performed:
Once you bring your pictures home, you need good tools to get just what you want out of them. Here is the set that I currently use:
Digital Photography Review http://www.dpreview.com/
Accurate Image Manipulation http://aim-dtp.net/aim/ (more than you or I ever wanted to know about digital color)
Picture Information Extractor (PIE): http://www.picmeta.com/
Irfanview: http://www.irfanview.com
Adobe PhotoShop 6.0 - The premier professional photo editing program. But I can't afford it. Instead I use:
Adobe PhotoShop Elements (Almost as powerful, but a lot easier to learn.) http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopel/main.html
Corel PhotoPaint 9.0: http://www.corel.com
Gimp (free, but steep learning curve): http://www.gimp.org
Qimage Pro: http://www.ddisoftware.com/qimage/
PanaVue ImageAssembler: http://www.panavue.com/
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This
camera was purchased for Christmas of 2000. Its major feature is the lens. It has a ten
power optical zoom and is stabilized to reduce jitter on those long shots. In
35mm terms, it will zoom from a 35mm wide angle to a 350mm long telephoto. Many
of the shots I took would have been impossible with other digital cameras. It
has a resolution of 1600 x 1200 pixels (2 megapixels). 
The C-2100 Ultrazoom has been oficially discontinued by Olympus. We had
despaired of ever seeing another image-stabilized long zoom consumer level
camera, so we bought a couple more as backup units during the closeout sales. Just before the 
This is an older model from
Kodak. It is much more compact, but only has a 2x optical zoom. In 35mm terms,
it goes from a 35mm wide angle to a 70mm portrait lens. It has a resolution of
1760 x 1168 pixels (2 megapixels).
There is a serious
problem with using digital cameras on long trips: the memory cards in the camera
fill up quickly. We have two cards for each camera, 64MB (holding about 128
pictures) for the Olympus, and 32MB (holding about 51 pictures) for the Kodak.
Previously I had taken my laptop computer along and copied the pictures to its
hard drive every evening.