Artwork and Imaging Software Using Digital Cameras To Collect

Artwork and Imaging Software
Using Digital Cameras To
Collect Portfolio Evidence
This activity looks at using a digital camera
and how to transfer images to a computer
and manipulate them.
Other activities in this section are:
• Creating and Using Digital Images
• Creating Images for use on the Web
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Introduction
This is not rocket science, but the application of available technology. If you are
looking for something technical, this tutorial is not it, and your time is probably better
spent reviewing some of the other excellent resources available.
What follows is a brief outline of my experiences, and a step by step “how to”, but
very much at a basic level, using a PC running the windows 2000 operating system,
and MS Office products. Of course it can all be done on Macs, or on Linux
machines, but that is outside the remit of this document.
Brief History
4 years ago our College first acquired a digital camera through some special
funding. It was a Nikon Coolpix 950, and cost about a million pounds.
As one of the only people in the College interested in ILT in those days I got to have
one of the 3 card readers that went with the camera installed on my computer.
At the time I was running the special needs provision at the College, and soon
realised the potential of this expensive piece of kit.
The special needs student were all delighted at the idea of being photographed, or
photographing others Previously we had spent a lot of my budget on developing
pictures of peoples knee’s, blurred heads etc… but with this new digital camera we
had the chance to pick which photos were worth printing, which saved an immense
amount of time and money. Initially this was enough, we had better photos that we
didn’t have to wait for, and the students used them in the minimal coursework that
we did.
Then we got another camera, a Mustek MDC800. Even though it was inexpensive at
just under £100, I felt suddenly able to hand this camera over to the students to use
unsupervised. It took photos of just as good quality, it didn’t have all the extra
facilities but the Nikon did, which meant the students could use it as a point and
click, and the batteries lasted for more than an hour. In fact the Nikon used to wear
batteries flat in no time, so much so that we needed to use an extra battery belt
pack.
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It was a short step from sending students out to take pictures to use in their
portfolios, to lending them the camera so they could take shots whilst on their work
experience.
The next step was the purchase of 3 SONY Mavica cameras, which not only take
great photos but store them on a floppy disc. This was a revolution, as it no longer
meant a specific computer had to be used to download pictures from the camera as
they were there immediately for use on any computer with a floppy drive.
These cameras proved outrageously popular with staff and students so much so
that I had trouble booking them for my traditional evidence gathering exercises.
Finally another solution presented itself in the form of the Mustek Gsmart mini
camera, which had the same 8mb memory as the Nikon and the MDC 800, but cost
only £23.
The image quality was not very good but as a tool to gather images for portfolio
evidence it was adequate, and at £23 it was almost disposable.
The story doesn’t end there, as at present mobile phone manufacturers are
embedding imaging hardware in their phones. I fully expect that in a couple of years
time accessing the hardware to record images will not be a problem at all.
The main problems with hardware at present revolve around getting the images to a
place they can be sorted out, which in the case of the SONY mavicas is easy if you
use a floppy disc, slightly trickier if you use something like the Mustek Gsmart, as it
needs to be connected to a USB cable, and use a machine that has the correct
download software. Cameras that use cards can be easy to access, as the cards will
plug into a card reader and simply slot into a USB port to be read as an external
drive under windows 2000 and NT.
Unfortunately the number of cameras and storage media types in combination with
computer specifications and restrictions make it tricky to be specific here, so I will
concentrate on the wider issues. If you would like help on a specific case try your
system administrator, ILT Champion, your JISC Regional support Centre, your NLN
subject mentor or a FERL representative.
Over the past 4 years I have come across many problems when using the digital
cameras to collect evidence, and in the next section I shall endeavour to help you
over or round some of the biggest hurdles.
To start with I must say that collecting evidence using digital cameras is not magic, if
your student cannot do a task, then the camera will not create evidence where there
is none.
Having said that it is excellent at assisting a student who may have poor literacy
skills in the creation of meaningful evidence… “A picture says a thousand words”,
which will prevent the student struggling to write them, what you are hoping to
assess is not their writing ability, but their ability to perform a task.
This form of evidence gathering is particularly useful in practical tasks, and indeed
my own experience comes chiefly from recording evidence for NVQ level 1 and 2
Agriculture and level 1 Horticulture.
The How to Guide that follows uses a SONY Mavica, though I’ve tried to keep the
advice general, and not dwell on machine specific points.
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How To Take Pictures Suitable For Use As Portfolio Evidence
The most important thing here has nothing to do with the camera, but to do with the
performance criteria. A pretty picture of a sheep silhouetted against a beautiful red
sky may look attractive, but all it shows is that the camera was in a field with sheep
in it. If the performance criteria calls for evidence of movement of livestock, then a
shot of where they started, the process of moving, where they ended up, and any
points of interest along the way would be useful. With Level 1 students it may be a
useful exercise to discuss what evidence they are going to try and collect, and work
out how they will record it. I used to use a shooting list for this, which was created
during the weekly tutorial slot, when portfolios were reviewed.
Similarly the credibility of evidence relies on your trust of the students and you must
ensure that evidence submitted is “relevant, authentic, current and reliable”, and
whilst photographs taken by the student may be hard to verify, pictures taken of the
student, with a witness statement from the employer or work mate provide very
powerful evidence. This may be an issue worth discussing with your internal and
external verifiers.
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Getting started
Preparation is everything.
Selecting media
First off we have to set up our camera, which means sorting out the media we are
going to store the pictures on. If you use floppy discs at any time, it is always worth
investing in a decent brand. These days floppies seem to be of variable quality and
it is soul destroying to go and collect a lot of evidence only to find it cannot be read
back.
So a decent name brand disc. Label it straight away, put down the date, and
images you hope to take, and the student’s name. This will save hours of work later
when you find 20 students have all handed you 3 discs.
Formatting Floppies
Even though the disc comes in a pretty box that says it’s been formatted, don’t trust
it! Always format floppy discs before use, again it saves problems later.
To format the floppy you can use the utility on the camera, or put it in your computer,
double-click on the My computer icon, then right click on the A drive icon, and
select the format option.
This will bring up the format box, hit the start button and wait for it to finish.
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This will take a couple of minutes, and whilst there is a “quick format 2 option, there
is nothing to stop you getting on with something else while the disc is formatting.
Once you have formatted the disc, keep it safe, a small case will protect it from dirt
and grit, and you will need to keep it away from magnets…. That means speakers,
TV screens, welders etc…. The data stored on the disc is stored magnetically, so if
you wave it at a magnet, you may loose all your hard work. The operation complete,
you need to decide on the quality of image required.
Selecting resolution
If you go to any high street retailer they will happily regale you with lengthy
monologues about the importance of image quality, and how their system is best
because it has 40 million mega pixels.
Whilst this is obviously very important for taking holiday photos, when we are
gathering NVQ evidence we need to consider some different quality selection
criteria.
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Most people are unlikely to be publishing portfolios by traditional printing methods,
which means you don’t need super detailed photos. What we need to establish here
is what a useful resolution is. A cameras resolution is measured in mega pixels,
and this is achieved by multiplying the number of horizontal dots or pixels that make
up the picture, by the number of vertical pixels. These tend to come in pre-selected
lumps because they relate to the resolution, or number of dots that make up a
monitor. Traditionally monitors could show about 72 dots per inch, which when you
multiplied it by the size of the screen gave you a resolution:
So 640x480 or what is known as VGA, gives 307200 pixels, that’s 0.3 Megapixels
More up to date, 800x600 or SVGA, gives 480000 pixels, or 0.5 megapixels,
Getting larger 1024x768, also SVGA gives 786432 pixels, or 0.7 megapixels
When the sales person in the shop tells you the camera records 1.3 megapixels, the
resolution is up to 1280x1024, which is known as UXGA.
Why do you need to know this? because all pictures take up file space. If you take a
standard floppy disc at 1.44Mb it can hold maybe 20 pictures at 640x480, or 10 at
1024x768 or 5 at 1280x1024. Unless you have unlimited storage it may be best to
go for a lower resolution. Our College limits the students to 20Mbs of network drive
space, that’s plenty of photos at low resolution, but not many at high resolution.
I tend to compromise using the 1024x768 setting, as this provides 10 decent
pictures on a disc, which can be cropped later without ending up with a blocky
picture.
The same applies to other media storage, make sure you have enough space
before you set out, and set the resolution appropriately.
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Taking Pictures
Taking the pictures themselves is the easy bit, though remember some simple
points:
• Take the lens cap off
•
Don’t put your thumb over the lens
•
If it’s too dark to see, turn on some lights or use a flash
•
Don’t take pictures with the sun directly behind you as your shadow
will block out the image
•
Don’t take a picture directly pointing at the sun
Transferring Files
So you have a disc full of photos, and you want the student to sort them into the
appropriate place in their portfolio. I would suggest this fits perfectly into the remit of
a keyskills session, which might otherwise be awkward.
The first thing to bear in mind is that you now have a bunch of files on a floppy disc,
and that access to data from the disc is slow, and the more times you access the
disc the more worn out the disc gets. So first thing to do is to copy the files onto the
hard drive.
This is simply a case of double clicking the A drive icon, clicking Edit>Select all,
Then Edit Copy.
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Now navigate to your hard drive space.
Right click to Create a new folder called images, and if you like a folder within it
with a description of the type of photos and the date.
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Open the folder click edit and paste.
You now have a folder full of files. They can be inserted directly into MSoffice
documents, or manipulated to better suit the purpose of the evidence criteria. The
most important thing to be aware of is that cameras often save the files with a
standard set of file names, MVC001.jpg for instance. This means if you try to copy
another disc full of files onto your hard drive you may overwrite the originals. To
prevent this you need to rename the files.
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File types, renaming and resizing
Files can be renamed by clicking twice on the file slowly, and typing a new name,
or right clicking on the file and selecting rename. It is important to remember the
extension that your file was saved with (the bit after the “.”, so abc.doc is a word file,
123.xls is an excel file) as this lets the computer know what type of program to open
it with.
There are basically 2 types of image files, compressed, and uncompressed.
Because each of the dots that make up your picture has to store information about
colour and brightness, it means that a picture can take up an awful lot of memory, so
most cameras tend to save the images you create as compressed files, commonly
this will be a file with a .jpg or .jpeg extension.
This file format stands for “joint photographic expert group”, and what it does is
compress files to make them smaller.
Imagine a picture of a plane with a blue sky background. If you were to record all
the data for the picture it might say something like:
• dot 1 blue and bright
•
dot 2 blue and bright
•
dot 3 blue and bright…
•
dot 468 blue and bright
•
and so on
The file compression says “dots 1 to 468 blue and bright”, and thus save lots of
space. By telling the compression how detailed you want your picture you can alter
how precisely it records the dots, and thus save space. With Jpg photos, the range
of compression runs from 1 - which would give you a useless picture to 100 - which
stores all the data, and doesn’t compress the picture.
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This is a
picture of our Bull, taken at 1472x1104 and taking up 259Kb of disc space.
This is the same image saved with jpg compression set to 1….Not a good picture
but only 28kb, 10 times smaller.
If you use a setting of around 50, you will get little discernable loss of quality but a
file size of 100Kb, a third of the original.
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Different
pictures respond to different compression settings, so you may have to experiment
to get it right. By reducing the size of the image as well as adding compression you
can shrink it even more.
This image was resized to 400x300 pixels, with compression set to 50, and only
takes up 13Kb.
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Hopefully you can see that you don’t need a massive file or lots of megapixels to
make a decent picture.
However you do need to be aware that every time you save a jpeg file it will
compress itself again, so if you need to alter or modify it be careful!
For manipulating the pictures I use Microsoft Photo Editor which is free with
Microsoft office, and is very simple to use.
Of course you don’t have to do any image manipulation, you can simply insert the
files directly from the disc into your portfolio document, and if you plan to do that
skip to the next section.
Image Manipulation
In this section I will show you how to crop, resize and save an image. Open
Microsoft Photo editor, and click on the open icon, then navigate to where you
saved your image files. Open the required file.
Much of every photograph is irrelevant, and one of the joys of digital
photography, is that you don’t have to keep it like that. Use the following
instruction to change it:
1) Select the “select” tool from the toolbar, the one that looks like a dashed
rectangle.
2) Click and drag the mouse over the part of the picture that you want to use.
3) Then right click over the framed area and select copy.
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4) Next click EDIT>Paste as new image, and your selection pops up before you.
The image we are now dealing with is the one with the blue bar above it. Once we
have cropped the image to a suitable degree, we can resize it.
To resize the file, click IMAGE>RESIZE, you can then select the units you want to
resize it with from the drop down menu, or select a percentage. By ticking the
allow distortion box you will merely resize the width or height, and squash your
image.
Once resized we can save our image, with appropriate levels of compression:
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The amount of compression is controlled by the slider at the bottom; to make this
visible you may need to click the “MORE” button below the box “save as type”
Selecting an appropriate name that allows us to work out what the picture is may
seem onerous at this stage, but again if you have to search through 30 files to find
an image, you may regret not naming it well in the first place.
Creating a portfolio framework
One of the problems I first encountered when using digital cameras to provide
evidence was that the image positioning in MS WORD was tricky. For level 2
students this wasn’t a problem, as they could format pictures, and move them to
where they wanted, but for those students who had simply taken pictures, and
wanted to then stick them onto a page to show what they had done, I created a very
simple table template:
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A 4X2 table with prewritten boxes for their name, and the unit details: to insert the
pictures they put the cursor in the required cell of the table, click select
INSERT>PICTURE>FROM FILE, and navigate to the image.
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Name Trevor Bing
NVQ 4. Moving Livestock Safely element 3 Bull movement
Unit
This is our bull
This is a map of the
estate
We had to move the bull
from
Here
To here
On the way he trampled
3 students
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Going a bit further
You are not limited to WORD as a method of storing portfolio evidence; many
people are beginning to see the benefits of digital portfolios. The student cannot
lose them, and if web based, they are available all the time, for both student and
verifiers to view, though whether allowing verifiers constant access to files is a good
thing, I don’t know).
There are several commercially available options, TAG Learning producing some
very interesting ideas (www.taglearning.com)
The simplest method however may be to use POWERPOINT to create a set of links
to evidence. This allows for a greater breadth of evidence types. The SONY Mavica
camera can record 10 x 10 second MPEG movie clips on one floppy disc, or record
sound as .WAV files.
These allow a suitably equipped assessor to visit a student, and record their
responses to underpinning knowledge questions, to “film” the student actually
performing the process, or to record the response of their employer. The process of
linking to items from PowerPoint (or WORD come to that) is simple.
As a starting point create a slide that lists the Units to be evidenced. Link these to
further slides detailing the performance criteria, and these in turn to the actual
evidence.
The link is made by highlighting the item right clicking on it and selecting
“hyperlink”, this simply points to the required document.
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This could be a slide in the show that has a video clip on it, or another file, or even a
website.
Once the criteria are set as slides that the student can link to their evidence, they
simply have to add slides whenever they have a new piece of evidence, and create
the appropriate link.
A template can be used to start the student off, detailing the performance criteria, or
they can create their own, and with careful guidance, they can hit keyskills outcomes
for IT (up to level 3) and Communications.
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Conclusion
Using digital cameras is not only a really efficient way of gathering evidence, it’s fun.
Here’s a brief 5 point summary to get the most out of them.
1. If you have the choice get a camera with the best lens you can, it’s the lens
which lets in the light, and makes a better picture… don’t be fooled by big
megapixel numbers, and also think about how you are going to access the
images… floppy discs, work on all machines, memory sticks and flash cards,
need reader, USB connections need special software.
2. Check your college insurance policy before lending out cameras to students,
it may not be so important with low cost items like the Gsmart, but some
cameras can cost hundreds.
3. Print out the Photo Editor instructions from this tutorial, laminate them and
stick them over the computers you intend to use to manipulate images, it will
save you lots of bother in the long run.
4. Remember to watch out for file sizes, a big file can block a printer, or bung
up a network.
5. If you are responsible for the camera, I suggest you use a diary as a booking
form, that way you can keep track of who has the camera. I also found it
useful to have a lockable box in which I can leave the cameras on charge…
there is nothing worse than getting to a site and finding the batteries are flat.
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