Fig. 3 I am not a camera guru. In fact I barely get by figuring out the settings for a dental camera. But I found a company owned by a gentleman who knows quite a bit. His name is Fred Friedman, Fellow of Intl. ACAD. Facial Dental Esthetics. His company is CLINIPIX (Office 561.793.4142/ email: clinipix @ bellsouth.net). I met Fred and his lovely wife at a meeting and what impressed me was he explained his cameras, but made no attempt to up-sell me. In the early nineties, I invested into a high dollar ring flash “monster” that only I was allowed to pick up. I was afraid that my assistant might drop it – that is true trust, huh? This was the last decade where we used slide photography – for a few of you who may not be familiar with the world twenty years ago, once upon a time; cameras used rolls of film. We would fill up the roll with our pictures and then take it to the drug store camera department where it was either sent to a lab or processed on site. It took about a week to get the 12 Fall 2014 JAOS “Choose the camera that enables you and or your staff to provide the best possible images to satisfy your particular requirements. Let your patients see the work your practice can accomplish and how it will improve their looks and their self-esteem.” pictures back. The problem was that we were not looking at the slides before we placed them in plastic sleeves. When in 1998, I began to really catch the teaching bug; I began to organize the slides from this killer camera. I found many slides were in the wrong charts; pictures were not straight on the slide – you cannot rotate these; there were over exposed slides, and underexposed slides. AND I WAS AFRAID TO LET MY ASSISTANTS TAKE PICTURES!! LOL!! In 2000, I purchased my first digital camera, again a ring flash warrior with all the bells and whistles. I continued to take most of the pictures with this 1 megapixel wonder, but I could see if I got a picture and if it was good!! Technology had given me a change to begin to document good pictures. We used this camera for around three years, but megapixels began to rise and I began to hunt for another camera. But this time I decided to change strategy. I had read about these “point and shoot” cameras. So I ordered two for each office. Now these cameras looked like a vacation camera
Journal of the American Orthodontic Society Fall 2014: Page 12
