montanum project underway - advice needed

[grady]

This post refers to the wild-growing C. montanum that I've mentioned elsewhere on Slippertalk.

I have decided to undertake a project that I've thought of for years: Make a photographic record of the growth of my cyps and, now that I've discovered Slippertalk, share the photos. Several questions have come to mind and I need advice in key areas.

First, some info on their dispersion. There are just over 100 individual plants in many clumps containing from 2 to 19 plants, and separated on the landscape into 13 patches. The furthest distance separating the patches is about 500' (our property is 660 feet wide and 1320 long).

I've decided to follow two or three of the clumps, probably the more showy ones. I'll devise a naming system to identify the clumps. This name will be the first part of the photos' names. I'll attempt to keep the perspective constant for each clump, although there's little I can do about the lighting. I'll try to photograph the plants at regular intervals, not letting much growth pass before taking the next set of photos (although I'm thinking I may have to sacrifice planned RV-travel). My camera is a Kodak Z612 that my wife, Joy, gave me for Xmas in 2007. The size of the files it produces at its best resolution range from 2 to 4mb. These file sizes are fine for use on my computer, but really slow things down if your internet connection is less than ideal.

So, the questions:
1) Should I reduce the size of the images for Slippertalk purposes?
2) Would it be best to provide a separate thread for each clump?

I'll probably think of more questions or concerns as this project goes forward, and I may edit this post again for that purpose.

The largest buds are now close to 4", despite many freezing nights, so I'll start taking the photos immediately. As I've answered the above questions, I'll begin posting the photos.

So, advise, please. I'm eager to get started.

 

[cnycharles]

It might be best to make a benchmark (like a really big tree or post in the ground), get a very good gps reading, and then measure how many feet away, and use a compass to figure out which direction it's in, and put it into your notes. Mark a, b, c etc.

I upload pictures to a server on our orchid club site, and to keep track I name them like (cypmontanumbud, cypmontflowers and then the month and year, and then 'a','b','c' etc so taking five pics of cyp montanum sprouts in april of 2013 could be named like (cypmontsprouts413a.jpg, cypmontsprouts413b etc.); this way you can see what it is, what month and which pic it was. If you are going to take multiple shots of the same thing in a month, you could use the whole date (41813a.jpg for april 18th, 2013, picture a...)

for internet purposes, I was told by a veteran photographer (a few actually) that for display purposes on today's screens, you generally only need to make an image of 95 ppi depth. this isn't terribly high, but is pretty acceptable for internet viewing. you would likely need higher if you were going to print an image, but you don't need to do this, and you don't really want others taking your image and printing it out, i'm assuming. you don't need more than the 72-95 ppi to display on a computer screen; the extra will only make the picture show up bigger, or let you print with better resolution.

if you upload a full-sized image from your camera onto a spot on the internet that allows image scaling, you have to make sure that when you scale the image to the display size you want (like 4 x 7" just for example), that it is reducing the file size at the same time. sometimes if you upload and scale to viewing size, it keeps the whole file size but just limits how big the image is... and you will still have the long download as it will be a full large file of a few mb.

if you want an image to display 5" x 7" on a computer screen from the internet, if you save an image at 95 ppi and the dimensions of 4 x 6, the resulting image will end up being pretty close to 5" x 7", depending on the resolution someone sets their screen to. if you save an image at a higher resolution but tell it display at 5 x 7, then it will end up displaying at a larger size on the screen with the same visible quality. usually, if I save a jpeg image that will display at about 8" width (say 4 x 8), and it isn't cropped/zoomed a whole lot then the image file size will end up being in the neighborhood of 600kb or less, lower if zoomed a lot.

Often when saving a file to display on internet as a jpeg, it may have a slider from 1-10 and say 'image quality' low/best, and I just use best/10.

A full jpeg from a full raw or large/high quality jpeg can easily be several mb's (and would be roughly 300 ppi for rough example comparison)

you can put up to 15 images including smilies into one post, so it depends on how much you want to show up at once and how many images you are going to post, whether or not you want separate threads

if need any explaining just let me know! someone else may have a better explanation of some of these points or have a better idea

 

[NYEric]

My advice is, don't let me take photos for you.

 

[cnycharles]

oh, and yes, use a tripod when you take close-up images oke: (thanks for the reminder )

 

[Dido]

I could help need more of this beautys....

 

[grady]

Really good photo posting info!

Thank you, cyncharles; or is it just Charles?

Thanks for taking the time to offer suggestions for this project. And, what the heck is it with all the garbage posts dealing with shoes? I saw garbage posts elsewhere here this morning as well. Where did that come from?

Anyway, I use a picture-resizing program (PIXresizer) that uses either a simple percent choice (25%, 33%, etc) or an input field allowing you to specify both the width and height. In addition to resizing the photo, the program also allows specification of DPI (not PPI, as you state in your post), with its default being set to 96. A typical raw photo from my camera is 2832 X 2128 and 1.88mb.

Since I know little about how to set image parameters in order to come up with the final screen display size and quality, and you seem to know much more, perhaps you could recommend what settings I should use for Slippertalk posts. Any further help would be much appreciated.

I've noticed several posts here that contain many images, like the 15 maximum that you mentioned, and on our slower rural satellite connection they take a while to load entirely. I love the higher-quality/larger images for the detail that they reveal (I'd never known that orchids were so beautiful or so varied!).

 

[cnycharles]

Hello Grady,

Charles is fine. You're welcome. Many people have helped me with the native orchid stuff in the last ten years, so it's my pleasure to help others with things that interest them.

There were a bunch of spammers that got on and flooded things; they have been getting pesky lately, most likely because this has been becoming a more popular forum so that always attracts the attention of people or groups who thrive on disruption. Heather and the moderators work quickly to delete things once they start popping up.

You're right; the image sizing is usually in dpi and ppi does show up in some places and it's hard for me to keep straight which is relevant for what display. Usually though, I think that dots per inch is for print; things printed are tiny tiny dots, and on screens you have pixels. But, if an image sizer asks you what dpi you want, this can also mean to ask you 'what visible size' you may want to display on a computer screen.

If you have computer display resolution for an image set to 96 dpi, and you have a raw image that is say 2000 dots or pixels across (width), then you roughly would have a picture that displays 20" across on your screen. If you resize it to 30%, then you would have a picture that would display roughly 6" across. If the resizing program is set to reduce the file size to the same percentage, then you would have a file size that would decrease at least more than 50%. (check my math, I already made one mistake )

What you can do, is practice making posts on slippertalk. Take a picture of something, leave it at full-size, upload it somewhere and then post a link to the picture on a slippertalk thread. See how big it shows up on your screen and how quickly it downloads. Then, reduce one by 25%, see how big and how fast, reduce the original by 50%, see how large and how fast, and so on. You'll quickly be able to see what numbers on your computer look like displayed on the internet/ST forum. Then instead of relying on another person to suggest a size, you'll be able to play a little bit and then know quickly how you would want to make a picture in the future. I'm not saying this because I don't want to help , it's just that once you 'know', it's much more fun playing around, and if someone else needs help, then you can also have satisfaction from helping them out! Plus, then you won't feel like it's weird science, which I do admit to feeling sometimes myself...

An image is always going to look like it has good quality, if you always save it at 95 dpi and you only show it at full-size; if you save it at 300 dpi or what would be full-size, then you will just have a larger image with the same quality, though you'll be able to see details more because it's 'zoomed'. Now, remember that this is all more off-the-cuff and not electronic, scientific facts but 'good enough and close enough' so that you can quickly make images yourself that usually will look good.

If you like really big pictures with close-up detail, then just try putting a few in a thread and see how they look and how fast they load. With my dialup and safari web browser, the browser often gets 'impatient' because it wants to load things 'fast' and sometimes will cut off picture downloads or give those little 'no picture' icons if things are taking too long....

hope this helps!

 

[grady]

Dialup...OMG!

Hi Charles. We lived with dialup here for many years. We didn't even get a well for 19 years (yes, we lived like many Navahos do - think, Tony Hillerman, my favorite author - hauling every drop of water used here).

You have a wonderful approach to explaining something; I'm thinking about the person who tells me he/she would rather teach me how to use a shovel, than dig the ditch for me.

So, I'll give it all a try. Got my first project photos today. I'm following three clumps of montanum, from 1" to 5" shoots. I'll be posting them soon.

 

[cnycharles]

well, thank you. it's not quite like avoiding digging a ditch for you (though I do like the analogy), but if you just do what someone told you, then there isn't understanding about how you might be able to play with something and have your own creation/imagination. and, if you forget something I said, or get something mixed up or lose the directions, then you're not much further along than you were to start! I was in that boat for a while so don't wish it on anyone else.

it also doesn't help that every image program that you see has things set up differently on how to adjust images, sizes, resolution and all that; they all want to be different than the other program, so they sometimes use different terms and put things in different menus, and have different options so that it can make things really confusing even now. graphicconverter is a great free image program that works on mac (don't know about pc), but it has so much stuff that it's hard to find just what you need sometimes

... and that's a lot of water-hauling!

 

[grady]

Test post only

This is a work-in-progress posting. My last attempt at editing this post resulted in the entire change being thrown away. I'll try once more. I'm working out how best to describe and present the photos on ST, while setting up a framework for handling the expected 45 or so photos that will be coming in the next few months, both on my computer and on photobucket.com. When finished, I'll begin three new threads on the cyp photo forum, one for each clump I'm following.

Image name format: clumpname-year-month-day-sequence letter-descriptor

Clump E, April 18, 2013

Wide view for this clump:
filename: E130418a-habitat.jpg, , image size about 123kb

Hi-res image for the above: http://i1333.photobucket.com/albums/w638/MartyQuizinski/Clump%20E/Original%20size/E130418a-habitat_zps78d6fe23.jpg

E130418b-shoots.jpg, , image size about 94kb
Photos of this clump's growth:

 

[Dido]

I am looking forward to much more pics

 

[grady]

unable to edit posts

For some unknown reason, today I am unable to edit any of my posts. I sure need some help here. This post is editable, but no others. I'm working on a sample post for the photo documentation project; I have been trying different things with this post, but today I can't change it.

Grady

 

[cnycharles]

There is a period of I think two days/48 hours or something like that where you can edit a post, and then it's permanent (unless you contact a moderator with a good reason why you want to change something, then they have to do it)

it looks like your images were deleted, wasn't able to see them today

 

[grady]

Thank you, Charles. I think I've got the bugs worked out now. The problems were all with the image-hosting services. As I found out - and I'm completely new to image-hosting services - there is no free lunch. Some even put web beacons on your computer and then track you everywhere (I highly recommend the NoScript addon for Firefox). I attempted - and failed - to get my high-res images hosted with the ability to serve up the original image; the hosts always down-size the image for transmission, and photobucket's option for full-res transmission seems to be broken. So, some effort is for naught, but learning is always valuable.