PHOTOGRAPHY: New age photo albums with digital photo frames
IT'S amazing what human beings will collect over the years. The one thing I’m sure we are all guilty of accumulating are copious amounts of photographs. If you are well disciplined you may have set aside a good few days of your life to frame your favourite photos or arrange these into albums for the coffee table. Either that or you have folder after folder of digitally stored photos on your PC.
There is something satisfying about whipping out an ordered photo album when guests are around, or having your favourite ones on permanent display. But this is the year 2011! Enter the digital photo frame.
This piece of technology doesn’t need much explanation – it is what it’s called: a photo frame that stores digital photographs. It has an LCD screen which can display a series of photographs in a slideshow format and a USB port from which to load new photos.
One is also able to choose how long each photo will display itself for and choose what transitions will take place between photos. These digitised frames can also be connected to the internet to download new content and can, of course, be connected to digital cameras.
The best digital photo frames have their own internal memory cards so they can operate independently of your camera’s memory card. Roughly speaking, a two Gigabyte SD card should store up to 1000 images.
It’s also a good idea to get a digital photo frame with a decent battery life. What’s useful is that most digital frames have an internal clock that can be set to switch the device on and off during different times of the day.
One would expect such a modern-sounding piece of technology to be expensive, but entry-level digital photo frames start from around R400.
The more advanced digital frames are obviously pricier but are able to do a lot more. Some can play videos, MP3s and display text. Others come with Wi-fi, have touch screens and light sensors and can connect to the web remotely and stream online galleries from sites such as Flickr.
Imagine a digital photo frame dedicated to your wedding day. It could begin with a worded introduction to set the scene, saying something like “Mr and Mrs Right were married in Perfect Park on a Friday, April 13”. This could be followed by a short video of the ceremony and lead into a slideshow with the wedding couple’s favourite song playing in the background. I smell a money-making opportunity! And that idea is absolutely free. I’m all about sharing.
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