I am on my third digital camera, and the 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 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!

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.

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.

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, furry-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 try to keep all pictures under 100KB in size, for I remember all too well those days before broadband when uploading took hours!

The maximum size I use generally is 800 pixels across, with screenshots taken with the camera, and some other items, being sized to 640 pixels across. Some smaller pictures are at 400 pixels and there are a few huge pictures of 1024 pixels and even the odd one of 1280 pixels where I believe I gigantic picture is really necessary. The small images used in all the picture links are 200 pixels across and the "Previous" and "Next" links at the bottom of some picture sets are 75 pixels across.

As at December 2006, BeebMaster contained approximately 1,700 main images using up 92MB of space, produced from over 5,300 images taken with my digital cameras with a total file size of over 9GB!

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