Flag Day & Some Photo Tips

Hi folks -- blogger John beat me in getting up a Flag Day entry (in a big way, since I got sidetracked by the Journals entry edit problems this afternoon) but here's a shot of the flags outside AOL HQ in luverly Dulles, VA:

Flags: US, Virginia, AOL

As anyone who knows U.S. flag etiquette knows, in a group like that, the U.S. flag should be displayed on its own right, which this one is (to an observer from outside).

On a photo note, I've talked about the advantages of digital cameras before, not the least of which is you can keep shooting and reviewing photos until you find the one that's right.

In this case, I took 10 photos before I found the right one, mostly because there wasn't enough wind to show the flags.

Why You Should Resize Photos
Now, with my camera settings, the original photo downloaded from my camera was 1600 pixels high x 1200 wide. This is really big, especially if you're just going to use it in your blog. For a three-column Journal, 450 pixels wide is about as big as you can go without causing a horizontal scroll (most monitors are 800x600).

The original pic was also 447 K, which is big for a single photo, even in the broadband world.

(Why take it so big in the first place? If you have the storage space, it's always best to shoot big, because you can always crop and resize a big pic later; you can't really make a small photo bigger and still have it look good.)

Now, you can technically mash a huge photo like this into a smaller space without cropping or resizing it, but it's not a good idea. As the saying goes, it's like "putting 10 pounds of potatoes in a 5-pound bag."

For example, when you try to scrunch a photo down without actually resizing it (you can do this by adjusting the HTML image height and width attributes to say, "Even though this picture is really 800x600, squish it down to a space that's only 600x450"), it's going to look jaggy.

Here, I did a minimal amount of editing of the photo, then cropped it to focus on the flags, and resized it to 450x600.

JPEG Image Quality vs. File Size
JPEG is the type of image file most usually associated with photographs. (You'll typically see GIFs for graphics, and of course animated GIFs.)

At the default Photoshop "High" setting for JPEGs (on a scale of 1-100, "High" is 60 -- the higher the number, the better the quality, but the bigger the file size), it was just 64 K. (At quality 100, the photo would be 120K, double the size.)

I may not know a lot of math, but 64 K is a lot better than the original 447 K. It's faster for you to upload, and it's faster for your viewers to download.

Of course, if you save a JPG photo at too low a quality, you will see JPG "compression artifacts" -- kind of squiggly, jagged, blocky areas on the photo. Photoshop and other photo editing programs often give you a way of comparing different quality levels, so you can find the smallest file size that gets you the best-looking image.

Enought photo tech talk. Here's one more of the flag photos, which I like since it tells a kind of visual joke:

Get it?

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: AOL, Flag Day, Photo Tips, AOL Journals