About a week before my son was born, I bought a digital camera. I wanted to create a baby book for him that would include not only his first year milestones, but also photos to capture his physical growth over his first year of life. I wasn’t sure which camera would be best so I went to Best Buy and talked to a sales representative. He helped me sort through the features and select a digital camera that would be best for my project.

If you’re a technology freak, you’ve probably owned a digital camera for years. But for someone like me, making the switch from traditional photographs to a digital format involved a leap of faith. It’s not that I don’t appreciate technology, I just wondered how good the pictures would be from a digital camera when compared to my trusty 35mm. So I bought the camera, brought it home, and began snapping pictures.

One feature about a digital camera that I love is the ability to review the pictures before printing and saving them. You can take a series of photos and then choose the best one without worrying about wasting film. But the most important feature, the one I was most worried about, was the quality, and I have to say that I was very impressed with my camera’s ability to turn out even better pictures than the ones taken with my 35mm.

Digital cameras have come a long way over the last few years, and now you can buy one with so many features that, if you’re an amateur photographer like me, you’d never even use. That’s why it’s important to talk to a salesperson when you’re buying a digital camera for the first time, so that you can decide what features you need and which features you can surely live without. Since I would be mainly taking pictures of my family, I didn’t need a digital camera with a tremendous zoom feature. But because I would be taking photographs most every day for a year, I did need a digital camera with a good battery. These were just a couple of the features I talked about with the salesperson at Best Buy and he was able to direct me away from the high-end professional cameras to the more reasonable ones without all the special features. I ended up spending extra money to get a digital camera with a good battery, but it was worth it because I hardly ever ran out of juice during an important event.