Choosing your Camera's resolution:

With today's digital camera's ever increasing resolution, it is important to know the answer to the question, "How much is too much?"

Obviously, it's nice to have the extra resolution there on your camera for when you need it. Having a camera that can produce 11x14s of Fido giving you his "More Food Please!" look is important. But when you are shooting for the yearbook, what resolution should you dial it in to? (and similarly, what should you tell your fellow volunteers to set their cameras at while they document the joyous activities of your children?)

As a fairly safe, cover all setting, the medium sized jpg setting on most modern digital cameras will get you plenty of resolution. Any larger, and you are just wasting computer hard disk space on a picture that's big enough to cover the whole page.

If you want to do the mathematical figuring... it would go something like this:
If 300 dpi gives you your optimal printing resolution, AND...
your camera's medium setting is 2,048 x 1,536 (Which is the Middle setting for a Canon PowerShot 8mp camera)
Divide the camera's settings by the 300 dpi and you get
2048/300= 6.8
1536/300= 5.12
That's roughly a 5x7 at full print resolution... which is plenty big unless you are planning on using the picture as a custom background.
If you are in doubt, you can shoot at a higher resolution and resize it later, but that adds a step of work. Of course, a couple big pictures won't have any impact on how quickly your computer can handle the information, but since we're planning on having hundreds of pictures in your book; you'll get better performance from your computer and the software if we keep the pictures sized appropriately.

Feel free to email me with what camera you're shooting with and I'd be glad to give you a recommended setting to shoot on. My goal behind this is that if you keep from using overly big photos, you get faster upload times, faster file saving and a book that runs more quickly while you're working on it!

I look forward to hearing from you!

Scott