edited photos notes

 

 

 I’ve been taking pictures since I was, umm, in fifth grade, I think.  1967, if I remember right.  I had a Kodak 110 camera that my parents gave me – a very simple point and shoot camera.  I’ve had various better cameras in the last 40 years or so.  One of the greatest impediments to taking pictures in this life is that even the simplist photos cost money to get copies of – after the car wreck in 1998, I was very poor.  In 2000, I got a computer and a scanner, and scanned some of the boxes of prints I have -rather tedious work.  At so much for a roll of film and so much for developing cost was something I had to think about a lot of the time.

The whole point of scanning prints was that I had discovered that 1. I can post pictures here 2. that I got good responses to my efforts.  Strokes my ego in a couple of ways.  But, scanning prints added about half a dozen steps to seeing something and sharing it here, so, when I got a tax return in 2005, I bought a good digital camera (that I could afford).  I have been taking pics exclusively with the Nikon Coolpix 2200 I bought then, and have taken (it’s got a meter on it) over 11,000 pictures with it.  I have uploaded over 7700 pics to Photobucket, and have thus posted almost as many here on OD.

I mentioned the other day that I had found, in sorting through the hard drive and making more room on it, that most all of my pics from the summer of 2007 had not been shot at the highest resolution and had not been edited – some had, to post that summer, but with a free Adobe editor that changed the look of the pics but not the resolution.  For some reason, I was using that editor instead of the Nikon tools that came with the camera.  Having some time on my hands, I resolved to fix the photos.

When I bought the camera, it was a fairly low end model, rated as a "2 Meg equivelant" camera.  It gives a couple of resolutions to shoot at – that 2 meg equilalent is a marketing chimera.  The highest res it shoots at is "1600+".  Since I bought the camera to post pics here, I used it at first at the "640×480" setting.  That size downloads pretty quickly over dial-up connections, and looks good on your monitor, but it doesn’t print for shit, and, as time went by and I thought of actually selling my pictures, I realised that I should be shooting at the highest resolution all the time – I can re-size pics for OD.

Those pics from the summer of 2007 I’ve been editing and posting lately were apparently shot at different resolutions.  I had just a 128 meg card for the camera then, so I had been shooting at the middle resolution to save memory space, and, even though I bought a 500Meg card half way through the trip, I apparently forgot to reset the camera at a higher resolution.  The Crater Lake pics are running about 300 -400k.  They print out ok on 4×6 paper, and not so awful badly on 8.5×11 paper, but, running them throught the Nikon Editor pumps them up in resolution.

Check it out:

This shot was taken at Crater Lake NP, looking approximately NW from the north side of the caldera, and is 61.5k in size (at 640×480).

This is the same shot after being "fixed" with the Nikon Editor:

This pic is 94.6k in size, at 640×480, and the difference is in the detail of the shot – its crispness over the first version.

Both have been resized using an MSN tool – the originals are 1200×1600.  The top pic comes in at 553k and the second one, after the Nikon editor, runs 2.4m.  It’ll print out that much better.

With the Nikon tools I can add or subtract red, green, and or blue to the pics, modify the brightness and sharpening, or make them black and white or sepia – or blue.  Why blue I’m not sure, but, B&W and sepia are fun options.

(I have not added any color to the pics of Crater Lake.  It IS that blue in real life)

I like sharp focus most of the time, maybe, I dunno, because I wear glasses and have always looked more at shape and color than at detail.  This helps using the LCD viewfinder – one thing I REALLY like about my 2200 is that it has an optical viewfinder, like an old style camera, because sometimes you cannot see that little LCD.  Most of the time I use the LCD to frame the shot – because it shows all of what the camera sees.  I use the shapes I see to set up the shot, composing in thirds. 1/3 the sky, 1/3 the lake/ a 1/3 of the ground – like that.  I strive for balance in the shots, and use natural framing if I can.   Sometimes, I’ll take the same shot from different angles and using different setting on the camera.

I always shoot using the "vivid colors" setting on the camera.  A lot of my shots are taken at the "scenic" setting for "sunrises and sunsets", which enhances the reds and yellows in the shot.  Sometimes I use the "landscape" setting to get maximum depth of field, and more rarely, I shoot in full auto mode and let the camera decide.  It’s a Nikon, and Nikon makes good cameras and very good lenses – and good software for the digital darkroom.

<pstyle=”text-align: center”>Of course, what helps most of all is having beautiful things to take pictures of.

Not all of my pictures are great – I do try not to take pictures of my fingers most of the time.

You, as the audience, are a very important part of it – I can take all the great photos I want, but if no one sees ’em, so what?  Thanks for looking.

 

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