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I’ve taken to carrying my digital camera around everywhere I go lately and found some pretty nifty uses for it:

  • On the fly pictures for my blog- One of the reasons why I’ve started making a habit of carrying my camera around is that a lot of times I would see something that would give me an idea for a blog entry and I would be cursing myself because I didn’t have my digital camera with me and my phone doesn’t take pictures (yes, I’m one of those die-hards that still wants her phone to be a phone). So now, when I seen something interesting, my camera’s there to snap that quick picture.
  • Inspiration- This use will be familiar to anyone who’s seen Project Runway. Have you ever seen something that inspires you to make a new piece of artwork? Perhaps it’s the colors of a sunset, or the texture of a piece of cloth, or the lines of a building. Now that I have my digital camera with me everywhere, I snap pictures of colors, inspiring scenes, or neat looking lines and arrangements. I then print those pictures out and put them on my Inspiration board in my studio. If you’re particularly good at snapping beautiful pictures, you can turn them into prints or little notecards. Check out the link roundup on Photographing Your Work for some tips on how to turn digital images into prints.

    In fact, if your a Flickr user and your photos are particularly good, you may be able to earn a bit of money. Stock photography company, Getty Images, has recently announced that they will be contacting Flickr users about liscensing some of their images for their stock photography clients. Depending on the liscense agreement, Flickr users may get between 20 to 40 percent of the liscensing fee should their image be chosen. You can find out more about this on the ReadWriteWeb site.

  • Visual reminders- I got this tip from a website on public speaking called Amazing Public Speaking. Sometimes when I’m on the road I’ll need to remember something, like where I parked my car, words on some signage, or how I packed my show materials in my truck. Now when I need to remember something, I’ll take out my digital camera and snap a picture of whatever I need to remember. Then whenever I need it, I bring up the picture on my camera.
  • Digital recording device- I got this idea from internet audio and video expert called Mike Stewart. My particular camera can record 3 to 5 minutes of video. The other day I got my idea for the tax tips blog entry while I was driving. So I simply pulled out my camera (while I was sitting at a stoplight of course), put it on the driver’s side seat, and turned on the video recorder. Then I recorded my tax tips to my camera while I drove. Then when I got home I transcribed what I said into a blog entry. Ready for something neater? I extracted the audio out of the video I made (the actual video only shows the roof of my car), edited it and included it in a podcast. But I wasn’t done yet…I took the edited audio, made a small slide show and combined them to turn it into a video tip which I’ll be posting on SlideShare. Three uses for the price of one!

So do you have a digital camera? What cool uses have you found for it?