Photographic Quality
I am on my fourth digital camera, which I have had since May 2008. The current model is a Canon Powershot A650IS, with 12 mega-pixels, a 6 times optical zoom and the ability to capture video. I always make sure my digital cameras have an optical viewfinder, which is much better for lining up a shot than looking through the digital screen, sensible batteries - this one takes normal AA size batteries (four of them, mind you!) - and storage on SD card.
In February 2011, I bought a conversion lens adapter and telephoto lens to allow me to take better pictures of The Royal Wedding.
This current model is by far the best but there are still occasions when I can't quite get the picture just right. Over the years I have refined camera settings and evolved ways of working which maximise the chances of getting a good result.
My first digital camera wasn't much more than a webcam and it really struggled to capture the level of detail needed to show some of my things at their best. It was fine for family snaps but show it a bit of circuit board and it would go into a coma. As time went on, the pictures improved as I got used to standing on the table whilst taking a picture of something on the floor but the finished result still left a lot to be desired.
In August 2003, I was given the idea of putting smaller items under my scanner. This is not something I had thought of before but I am pleased to say that the improvement was immeasurable. As an example, see the "before" and "after" pictures of my Econet prototype modules below.
I am certain that you will be able to tell the difference, although I very rarely use this method now, as my later cameras have given me a much better result.
In November 2003, the picture quality issue reared its head again. I was in the middle of taking a set of pictures of how to fit a SCSI interface to a BBC Master for my Domesday section. This was not something which could easily be put under the scanner, so I went out and bought myself a new digital camera - an HP Photosmart 735.
My third camera came a bit later after the second one unexpectedly broke down due to a "firmware error". I wanted the same model again but I got a slightly upgraded one in the end with a few more Mega-Pixels, an HP Photosmart 935.
I kept this one in use till I upgraded again in May 2008 to the present model.
Much of the photography used in BeebMaster needs fairly small details to be seen very clearly. I like crisp, sharp pictures. I'm not into this soft-focus, fluffy-edged romantic stuff. The on-camera display is too small to be able to tell most of the time if the full-size picture is going to be any good. Two pictures taken more or less consecutively can produce vastly different finished results. So as a general rule, I take two or three photographs of each shot and then use the best one of each for the website.
I crop the pictures to include all the relevant detail and then rescale them and save them on a reduced picture quality. I use a quality of 70% in JPEG which vastly reduces the file size. I initially had a maximum file size requirement of 100K, because BeebMaster didn't go broadband till February 2006. I've relaxed this rule somewhat nowadays, but I still try to keep all pictures under 200KB in size, for I remember all too well those days before broadband when uploading and downloading took hours!
I've increased the standard picture size to 1,024 pixels across from an earlier maximum of 800. Screenshots taken with the camera, and some other items, are sized to 640 pixels across. Some smaller pictures are at 400 pixels and there are a few huge pictures of 1,280 where I believe I very large picture is necessary. In my Royal Wedding section, there is the odd special picture of 2,048 pixels.
Logos for sections are usually either 400 or 512 pixels across and the small images used in all the picture links are 200 pixels across. I used to put "Previous" and "Next" links as a navivgation feature at the bottom of some picture sets. I don't do this any more but the existing pages have these links pictures at 75 pixels across.
Since November 2008, I have been using Ubuntu as my main PC operating system, which has some very natty features to save me oodles of time in picture editing.
I used to have to select, crop, resize and rename each picture individually, and then do it all again to produce the preview sized images for each picture set, which used to take longer than any other part of making my website.
But now all I have to do now is select the pictures I want from those downloaded from the digital camera, crop them and save them. Then the resizing, reducing quality, renaming to the "big" prefix and creating the small previews images all happens automatically thanks to a thing to "Phatch", which stands for Photo Batch Processor. I just drag in the set of images, load one of my settings for 640, 800, or 1024 pixel images, and then again for the 200-pixel sized previews, and it all happens in a few seconds!
As at January 2012, BeebMaster contained approximately 6,100 main images using up almost 370MB of space, produced from over 26,000 images taken with my digital cameras with a total file size of over 100GB!