Having an updated inventory of your house is important. For example in case of disaster or burglary insurance claims are much easier when you can write down exactly what was in the house and also provide visual proof for that list. Taking inventory photos of your house using the Canon PowerShot Pro Series S5 for example is easy if you follow a few simple steps. The first thing to do is to write down the list of what is in your house and what you would like to take digital photos of. If you have a lot of stuff in your house you should also figure our a way to catalog the photos. You can for example sort the photos by the object alphabetic order or you could sort them by the room where the objects are. Another option is to sort them by object type, for example photos of all your books, all tables, all clothes and so on. The next step would be to use your Canon PowerShot Pro Series S5 to take the inventory photos. There are basic rules you should follow when taking those photos in order to achieve a better catalog. As always the simplest and most basic rule to follow is just basic good digital photography rule. Make sure that the lighting is good and the composition is good. Inventory photos are most likely indoor photos as lighting might be limited. It is always better to try and get natural daylight by for example opening windows. If not possible use flash when needed or slow photography by positioning the Canon PowerShot Pro Series S5 on a tripod. Inventory photos are intended to document and emphasize specific objects. As such the background on which the objects photos are taken should be simple. The background should also have good contrast against the object. For example do not use a white background to take photos of white objects and do not use noisy and busy backgrounds at all. Try to take photos of objects in their original place. This is especially important for future insurance claims as those photos look more authentic. If you have to move an object in order to take its photo then try to take two photos one of the misplaced object and one of the place where the object is usually placed. If some objects are unique or have special details that are important then take zoom photos of those details. Remember that digital photos are literally free if you feel you need a few objects to document one objects then take and store those photos. For example when taking a photo of your television always take another photo that zooms into the sticker on the television detailing the exact television model. Taking digital photos of some objects is not obvious. For example if you have receipts of products that you bought take photos of those receipts. Use good photography practices and zoom into the receipt. Having this photo next to the product photo will provide valuable information when needed in the future. And last but not least always backup the inventory photos. It is better to have an extra copy of those photos outside of your home after all if there is a disaster you would not want to lose those photos too which might happen if they are placed in your house. Give a CD with a copy of your photos to a friend or someone else that you trust.
Old cameras captured photos on film. Digital cameras however capture photos on memory in the form of digital files. There are many file types each with each own unique format. Here is an explanation about a few common digital picture file formats. When you take photos with the Canon PowerShot Pro Series S5 each photo is saved as a digital file on the digital camera memory and most likely is later transferred to your computer. Like any other computer file digital photo files can also have different formats. Every computer file is comprised of a long series of bits and bytes. A file format is a description of the meaning of those bits and bytes or in other word a file format explains how the file should be read and interpreted. If you like you can compare a files and file format to writing text. When you write a sentence you basically type a series of characters. They are meaningless unless you know that they are in a format called English and that specific combinations of characters have certain meanings. There are a few common formats for storing digital photos each with its advantages and disadvantages. Usually digital cameras like the Canon PowerShot Pro Series S5 let you choose which format you would like to use. The first big difference between format types if the compression method used if at all. But first lets quickly review what compression is and what it is needed. A digital photo is a collection of pixels. Each pixel represents a tiny portion of the whole digital photo and has a color and intensity attribute. Usually pixels are stored in true color as a three bytes triplet. Each byte represents an intensity of one prime color. Mixed together they provide an exact color and intensity representation of that pixel. The size of a digital photo file depends on the resolution in which it was taken also known as the number of mega pixels. The number of mega pixels grows as cameras get more advanced. A common 8 mega pixel camera generates eight million pixels for every single digital photo that you take. That is quite a lot of pixels and with 3 bytes per pixel storing each digital photo will consume 8,000,000 pixels times 3 bytes = 24,000,000 bytes also known as 24 megabytes. This is a very big file. It will result in having less space on your camera memory card for storing photos, it is hard to process, slow to send over email, slow to upload to a web site and so on. Fortunately there are efficient way to store digital photos that consume much less disk space. In every photo that you take there is some redundancy and inefficiency. Compressing a digital photo is a method that removes redundancy and details that are considered not important or not noticeable by the viewer. In our previous example a 24 megabytes digital photo file could easily be compressed to consume only 3 megabytes with hardly any noticeable quality degradation. The compression method described above is also known as lossy compression since some information although hardly noticeable was lost. There are other compression method with are known as lossless and which create a compressed file that can be uncompressed to exactly the original file. They are however less efficient and can not achieve such high compression ratios to convert a 24 megabytes file to a 3 megabytes file. Most cameras allow you to choose between two photo formats, compressed or RAW. Raw format is simply the uncompressed version of the digital photo and it consumes a lot of space. Professional photographers use RAW format as it provides better quality when processing the photo later on. For all other photographers a compressed JPEG file is a better choice. Digital cameras like the Canon PowerShot Pro Series S5 also let you set the compression ratio. The higher the ratio the smaller the file but at the same time the more degraded the quality of the compressed image.