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Photos on the Web
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| Ah, photos, those lovely little things that fill boxes and bore friends. Well, in the non digital age, photos or rather slides were pretty easy to deal with. You beg borrowed or stole a slide projector, caged some mates in a room and wow, pictures. Of course now once you get set up its a lot easier to show your pics to the world, or is it? Everything you see of the berg is from photos I've taken over the years. They are all from slides, mainly 100 iso Fuji film, but theres some 50 iso and some Ektachrome in there. I've been scanning for a while now, with a handy little dedicated slide scanner that hangs off the back of my PC. It produces a 2700dpi image, which for your average slide equates to a 27MB BMP file. If storing files in Tiff format, they are around 20MB each. Obiviously such monsters can't go onto the web. At 3800 by 2500 odd pixels, the size is just to big. So I need to resize. Here is where the problem is. I've been monitoring who does what on my pages, and 53% of visitors use 800 by 600 resolution. So, sadly but partically I've elected to resize largely for these folk (all photos are 750 by 500). I use 1280 by 1024, so the images look too small for me, but some people will in fact be using 640 by 400. Sorry about the scrolling then. As a compromise I've made the thumbnails large.
Using a free service provider mean that space is actually a deal for me, so I cannot put all my photo's on line and can't really offer a variety of sizes. I may occasionally put a big fellow on for a while to whet your appertites as to what I have.
As regards quality, I've gone for 50% compression (and hence loss) in converting to jpeg. For on screen use this seems fine especially at the small size. If you try to print the pictures you will quickly see they are in fact tiny at very high resolution. This is partly because they come that way from the scanner, but also to remind you that I legally am the owner of these things. Sure, if you want to copy them I can't stop you, but if you want to publish any online, please let me know. Should you be interested in getting far better quality and a more extensive range of berg photo's I can make up CD's on request. There will be a charge involved but mail me and we can talk about it. |
OK, for those who want to know, this is the hardware I run. I've got an AMD 1300mhz processor with 512MB of DDR RAM. I scan with an ACER scanwit negative and slide scanner at 2700dpi. I burn CD's with a Yamaha 8X cd burner and do my editing in Photoshop. Recently I've been messing around with Linux, although the first Gimp editted file is yet to appear on this site. I work at 1280 by 1024 on a 17 inch screen thanks to a 64MB geforce 4 graphics card. Back home in SA this would cost me an arm and a leg to setup, but the whole thing is actually only US $ 1200. (thats with a DVD drive, for what its worth). The photos were taken with 3 different cameras, an Olympus OM1, a Ricoh KR5III and a Nikkomat. Lenses vary a lot from cheap junk to Vitiar series one stuff and some good 50mm. I use a tripod a lot and rely on polarising fliters to saturate the shots |