[Bill Musarra]

Jim,
One thing I have found out in using a digital camera is that it is all in the details. My father in law who passed away about 2 years ago, was the chief camera man for WXIA in Atlanta.(started out as a truck driver) He was well known in the news media. He had a full fleged studio and dark room inthe basement of his house. He was medically disabled but was able to get aroound. After his wife died, I built him a computer and introduced him to computers so he could email his buddies since he couldnot drive on long trips anymore. On that computer, I put Microsofts "Picture It" as it came bundled with some other software. I found it the easiest software to use to edit digital photos. When I introduced him to digital photography with a $20, on special camera that would take 10 photographs at 1.3MP, he was hooked. He went out and researched the field as he had some pretty fancy cameras and lenses.From that day on he never picked up a film camera again. He wound up buying a top of the line, mid range camera for $400. It was the Olympus Camedia C-3030 Zoom camera with 3.3 Megapixels. Nothing fancey. by todays standard. He found that to do 5x7 that was all he needed. If he was going to do 8x10, he would have to go up to 5 MP to get studio quality prints. He experimented with that computer software and his standard printer, and figured out that the quality prints had to have a quality printer. He tried all the different types of paper including canvas types, which on a quality printer look just like a painting on the canvas media. He used that camera on a movie set at Kennesaw Mountain on a historic Civil War movie and captured a shot of four horsemen comming around a bend with all four horses in the turn and all their hoofs off the ground. He submitted the digital shot in a Marlboro competition and won.
What I am getting to is this, It doesn't take an expensive camera to get quality shots. They all have settings in their internal software that will allow quality shots(EQ, SQ etc.). They just let you take fewer shots with the higher quality settings.(10 as compared to 399). The rest is up to the editing. On Picture it, there is an area that lets you alter or adjust the brightness and contrast and you can do it manually or hit the automatic button and it does it automaticly. Thats what I do and it is done. And thats how these were done except that some were cropped.
Bill