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Photos |
Beyond Photography |
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All Beyond photography is currently done with a digital camera.
We now have a NIkon CoolPix 5000 and a NIkon CoolPix 5700, both taking photos at 2560 x 1920 pixels.
The 5000 is good for closeups (of small flowers, for example). But, since auto-focus isn't reliable at close focus, we need to set a fixed-distance focus and use a tape measure for each shot; rather slow and cumbersome.
The 5700 has an excellent zoom telephoto, and the electronic viewfinder is great idea: we're sure that what we're seeing (including the color-cast, for example) is what we're recording.
Prior to the 57xx's we had a NIkon CoolPix 950. Pretty good camera, but a few months after the guarantee ran out, the tripod mount, set into the plastic body, ripped the bottom out of the camera. A very expensive (for us) design stupidity.
Prior to the CoolPix 950 we had an Olympus Camdia 1400L (I think it's a "600" in the US market). A pretty good camera, but gave a color-cast to the photos that had to be corrected for each photo, and the resolution wasn't as good at the Nikon CoolPix. There were other operational problems, like downloading the SmartMedia chips to the Mac via a serial cable with difficult set-up. So we traded up.
We began the Beyond project in 1995 with a "real" camera: our trusted and much loved Leicaflex SLs (purchased in 1968 and used constantly since then, with a 35 mm lens and a 90 mm lens. Several kilos of camera felt good, but were a drag for hiking. We needed a longer telephoto (among other lenses desired), but a single second-hand Leicaflex lens cost twice as much as a brand-new modern camera, including lens.
We abandonded the Leicaflex for a Nikon F70 with a generic-brand 28-200 mm zoom lens (our very first zoom) and a Nikon 60 mm macro lens. This is an ideal package. The camera is so good we actually got used to a bit of automation, and the lenses are great. The macro got us our best flower photos. All we needed was a longer telephoto for things like photography in the Camargue. Alas, the Nikon F70 now sits in a drawer because of the nuisance of converting film photography to the digital requirements of the web.
Film versus Digital. With film photography, we took slide (diapositive) color photos, and had them transferred to Kodak photo CDs directly by Kodak during processing. Film is expensive, processing is expensive, it takes a week or two for the processing (in France), and Kodak screwed up something major each and every time.
Photos Into the Beyond Web.
In the early days we resized our big Beyond photos (other than the thumbnail-sized ones) to about 400 x 250-300 pixels. We were aiming for a maximum file size of about 25 k bytes, allowing a "reasonable" download time via the 14-k modems of that era. Now we try for an image size of about 550-600 x 400 pixels with a file size of about 40 k bytes. It seems to give about the same download time on today's 28-k and 56 k modems.
We've also improved image quality, partly with a few year's experience and partly with better image reduction by Photoshop. After cropping and resizing the images, we export/save with a JPG quality 3 or 4. Increasing the quality level unfortunately increases the file size dramatically.
We realize that the photos on some of the earlier pages are both small and of questionable quality. Some day we hope to get back to those to improve them, but there's always something more urgent waiting to be done.
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