eBirdseed.com Wild Bird Feeding Blog

Mealworm Giveaway Update: Only 3 cans left... Ummm... Now there're only 2 cans left... Better hurry!

On the June 6th post of this year (Building a Post), Gerry entered a very interesting comment. In it, he asked the following.

"...I would like to know what setting do you take the photos at? Specifically, now that Digital Cameras can record at 10 megapixels and up, it makes for better photos... but not for the web since the web has an issue with the larger file sizes that result from higher megapixel settings. I read a lot about "Optimizing" photos for web use. How does that work for this blog..."

I'll take these questions/issues one at a time as best I can...

1. "I would like to know what setting do you take the photos at?" Believe it or not, probably 95% of the photos taken by the old Olympus 2100 are shot using either the default automatic mode or in the macro mode. When the camera wants to cooperate, the results can be stunning.
   
   
   
   
2. "Specifically, now that Digital Cameras can record at 10 megapixels and up, it makes for better photos... but not for the web since the web has an issue with the larger file sizes that result from higher megapixel settings." Whew... Tough point. As I understand it, a high resolution picture (e.g. 1,600 x 1,200 pixels, originally shot by the 3.0 megapixel automatic camera) can be cropped and "shrunk" to 400 x 354 (like the one below) with no loss of quality.
   
   
   
   
   
   However, the opposite is not true - a low-res picture becomes "pixilated" or digitally blurred when it is expanded to a large size. By way of analogy, you can take a quality, poster-sized photo and shrink it down to a postage-stamp-sized object. But you can't blow a newspaper comic up to the size of a poster - the visual information simply isn't intrinsic to the comic. So, while it's quite true that we really have to resize photos to speed up the Web site page download, we also needed to find a way for the public to openly access our entire photo library in all its sizable glory. That's why we stored almost all our pictures (1,241 photos and climbing) on the photo collection site Flickr. And what's just as important is that each photo is available in a variety of sizes including the typically large original. You can view and use those pictures free of charge by accessing our CapeCodAlan Flickr sets site.
   
   
   
   
3. "I read a lot about "Optimizing" photos for web use. How does that work for this blog?" Now this last question deserves a post of its own, because it begs some other questions. We'll have to save this one for the next entry...

But before I go, here's a rather nice shot of an oriole, (they do love that grape jelly!)...



Stay tuned by those feeders, and keep a sharp eye peeled for the next contest!

CapeCodAlan