Yes, I caved in and bought a new camera. Between the right pricing and no interest financing, I decided it was was meant to be. I picked up a new Canon Digital Rebel XT (8 megapixel SLR). It has an 18-55mm lens and is very lightweight. Of course, I haven't even read the manual, but I did go out and shoot some pics today. I guess I had better buy an extra hard drive: my first ones were over 5 megabites apiece! Harold
Oh Man, am I ever jealous! Based on the beautiful photos you take, I'm betting that your next Birthday/Christmas present will be a zoom lens that takes you out to about 300mm. You know, the type of lens that lets you shoot the "BLD" date on a box car at least 3 miles away. (or a mole on someone's backside at the same distance)
Having trouble loading your full sample picture (I think it exceeds my ISP's upload & file size limit) Anyway, here's one for now: http://home.nc.rr.com/hhodnett/images/IMG_20050320_0231.JPG It is truncated to only about 4 woo woo woo out of the 5.25 woo woo woo of the original; the original image is 3456 x 2304 pixels. (Notice I did not post it to RailImages to avoid eating up the bandwidth ) It is in JPG format, as the RAW version would have been considerably larger! I think it is a little out of focus, but I hope to get the hang of it all soon. Harold
Nice shot, Harold. Looks like you're going to have lots of fun with your new baby...! BTW, isn't that short train just a little over powered?
Hank, you are too kind (either tha or you have my pictures confused with someone else ) I will add a zoom lens as soon as I master what I've got.... I like the lightweight lens that is on the camera (18-55) and they make a 55-200 as well. That'll give me a reach of 320mm (35 mm film equivalent) that you requested Harold
Wow 8 megapixel SLR camera I'm sure you will become a master of it. I guess the only problem is the size of the file but im sure you can compress it. Look forward to seeing more pics.
I see that the image is 3456 pixels wide and is in .bmp format. I assume the camera saves in bmp? I downloaded the pic and resized to 800 wide and saved in .jpeg, compressed a bit and it brought the file size down from 15,553 kb to 90 kb! And it still looks great That is a camera I would really like!
That is odd From everything that I can see, it is a JPG and saved as a JPG when I took it. Opening the link in Internet Explorer and when I right click on the (full size) picture, its properties indicate it is 4389728 bytes and 3456x2304 pixels. Why would there be a difference? Harold
Very strange. It gives the file type as .jpg but when I right click and select 'save as' it will only save as a .bmp My browser automatically resizes the image to fit the page, which I can override, this gives the difference in file sizes. On full size the properties says size - not available Anyway, great picture
It's truly JPG/JPEG and will compress rather well even without resizing the image just by simply opening it in Microsoft Photo Editor and doing a Save As without any modifications and it compressed it by about 50%. For best downloading / bandwidth most sites keep images below 100K with most around 30-60K. Still, being able to start with such a sharp image beats my poor 1 MegaPixal images so all I can say is...
Thanks, Darren. I have been having trouble resizing the images appropriately. For my trainweb sponsored website, we are required to keep images below 100k. I need to work on my resizing and compression skills. Harold
The DHVM is also TrainWeb so I know the requirements as well so I have spent allot of time with various Imaging tools to reduce the sizes without lossing the quality of the image. If you do find one that is really tough upload it to RailImages and I will give it a shot once I get it downloaded.
I am struggling still... every time I resize an image in MS Digital Image Pro 10, it also changes the pixels in the resolution as well, which makes it appear fuzzy Harold
