YOU CAN DO IT TOO! Today, I'm shooting most of the shots for the web with a Kodak 290 digital camera with a USB connection and flash card reader connected to my computer. It's fast. It's easy. And it does a great job. For the print catalog, I'll be using my 4x5 cameras to the right. Why do I shoot my own shots? Well, of course I'm cheap. But the real reason is that when it's 10 P.M. at night and I want to finish a page, it's hard to find a photographer. Remember, there used to be 400 people at DAK 1. And I even hired a few photographers for a while. But the truth is I like to capture the essence of what I see in a product. So that's why I do it myself. Plus, if you're going to shoot portraits, you need to be an artist. For product shots, it really is the essence of the product. And nobody understands that more than the engineer or hopefully me when I'm writing about the product. There's a lesson here for all of us. Taking the pictures is really the mechanical part. YOU CAN LEARN TO DO IT YOURSELF. In fact, there's precious little you can't learn to do yourself in running a business. I highly recommend that you get a digital camera and start using it. I've always said that the difference between a professional photographer and me is the amount of Polaroid film we use. I may need 5 or 6 shots to capture what I want while a "real" photographer can get a perfect looking shot with one shot. But, since I know what I want to capture, getting there is worth the effort. And with a digital camera, there's no cost for film So, go to it. Like most things, they are only hard until you learn how to do them. And like I said about my underwater SCUBA cameras, "It's not a far reach from taking pictures of products in Taiwan to taking pictures of Lion Fish underwater in the Red Sea. The fish move, the products don't. Diving photography can be a bit more challenging". YOU CAN DO BOTH! Return to Main Page