Show Off Your Shots in the DigitalTips Best Shot Contest

By Colleen Lerro

CEA just launched a photo contest on Digital Tips. Do you love sharing your pictures on the Web? Join the Digitaltips Best Shot flickr group and upload your photo – that’s all it takes for a chance to win some great prizes including a Digital SLR camera. Find out more and see how you can be one of 15 lucky winners at www.digitaltips.org/bestshot.

You see cameras everywhere when you’re out and about, so it’s no surprise that 77 percent of U.S. households own a digital camera. CEA just finished a study called The Digital Photographer – Segmenting the Market to Gain Deeper Understanding that looked at photographers and dug deeper to examine just those that have actually used a camera in the last year. It turns out not all photographers are created equal as the study found photographers can be split into six different groups.

Picture Happy Socialites
Happy with current digital photo devices and capabilities, this group loves taking spur of the moment pictures and lots of them. They use newer devices with a lot of megapixels and are extremely likely to post their shots on blogs, social networking sites and online photo services.

Frustrated Photogs
These late adopters usually use lower cost, older devices and take fewer photos than most. Of all the groups, they are the most unsatisfied with options for sharing, storing, editing, printing, organizing and protecting digital photos. They want a digital camera that is easy to use without any extra bells and whistles, and are interested in being able to pay someone else to upload, print and post their photos.

One-Click Wonders
One-click wonders bought a camera because it seemed like the cool thing to do, but don’t do much with their photos after snapping the shot. They also own lower cost devices and take a lot fewer photos than most.

Feature-Focused Photos
This group loves to adjust the functions and features of their camera manually to help enhance their photos, which often feature friends, family and natural scenery. Using moderately priced, new point-and-shoots, this group is interested in the new features cameras of the future will have to offer and likes to share their photos as well.

Digital Curators
Serious about their work, these are the archivists and documentarians of digital photographers. They enjoy printing, organizing, displaying and sharing their digital photos, and would be very disappointed if they somehow lost all of their digital photo files. They take a lot more photos than most on higher priced, higher megapixel devices and are looking forward to new features such as facial recognition and geotagging.

Digital Mavericks
Young, early adopters make up this group who are very engaged with new technology in general and are very enthusiastic about photography. This group uses multiple devices to take their pictures and is the most interested in future features such as touch-screen controls, wireless printing and voice commands. They know what they’re doing when it comes to printing, editing and storing and really enjoy sharing their pictures online.

Do you fit in to one of these categories? What’s your device of choice to shoot pictures on?

Photo courtesy of Lindsay Goodman