Waverley Camera Club

Have you ever heard of a “GigaPan”?

This is the future of digital photography (but not just yet!). Not a megapixel camera, but a Gigapixel camera with the ability to photo stitch gigapixel images to make a “Gigapan”!

Sorry about the jargon!

Have a look at this image taken at President Obama’s inauguration, with a 1,474 megapixel robotic camera. Wait until the image loads and zoom in..and keep zooming and be amazed at the level of detail you can get from the zoom.

Makes my 12 megapixel camera look a bit pathetic!

Enjoy!

Pete Davies has kindly sent some instructions on preparing your images for EDI submission.

These instructions are for Photoshop, I apologise if you dont have PS but the theory is the same and the actual instructions should be similar whatever program you use.

If you want to enter some pictures in the digital comp at Waverley CC then here is what you do.

First select the photo you want to enter and do all the work in Photoshop that you would normally do to it, such as cropping, straightening etc…

NOW SAVE YOUR WORK. This is very important. Up until now you have been working on an image that is roughly 8 x 12 inches (depending on your camera) and if you continue on with the steps we are about to do without saving you will end up with an image that is too small to print should you decide you ever want to do so.

Have you saved your image? Good. Don’t close the file because we are about to resize it so that it conforms to the PI rules.

For this example lets say that the image you have just saved is 8 x 12 inches in size at a resolution of 300 pixels/inch. That would be perfect to print out and frame but it’s too large a file for the PI comp.

At 300 pixels/inch an image which is 8 inches high is 2400 pixels high. (8 x 300 = 2400)
And so an image which is 12 inches wide is 3600 pixels wide. (12 x 300 = 3600)
So in terms of pixels your image is 2400 x 3600.

The digital projector we use can only output 1024 pixels across and 768 pixels from top to bottom. This 1024 x 768 resolution is known as xga resolution and is based on the same number of pixels found in the old crt monitors. As technology improves and becomes more affordable we will probably move to High Definition which is 1920 x 1080 pixels but for the foreseeable future 1024 and 768 are the numbers you need to know.

To resize your large image go to the IMAGE menu in the tool bar and scroll down to IMAGE SIZE. If you are using a newer version of PS the short cut is Alt+Ctrl+I. A new dialogue box will open up and it’s in here that we make the necessary changes.

For the example I am using an image which is 8 inches high x 12 inches wide and 300 pixels/inch.

Make sure that the constrain proportions box and the resample image boxes are ticked. You will find these boxes at the bottom left of the dialogue box. Having these boxes checked will ensure that when the picture is resized both dimensions will be resized proportionally thus maintaining the picture’s aspect ratio.

To make this file smaller go to the top part of the dialogue box marked pixel dimensions and change the width figure of 3600 to 1024. Doing this will automatically change the height figure to 683 pixels.

Once you have changed the width to 1024 pixels go to the drop down box at the very bottom of the dialogue box. It probably says Bicubic. If you are using a newer version of PS you will have the option of Bicubic Smoother and Bicubic Sharper. If you do then choose Bicubic Sharper. If Bicubic is the only choice you have then that’s fine.

You will notice that the image is now 3.413 inches wide and 2.276 inches high and if you look at the top of the dialogue box you will see that the file size is now 2.00M. Before the resizing it was 24.7M so it is a significantly smaller file.
Why is the image now 3.413 inches wide I hear you ask? Well the image is now 1024 pixels wide still with 300 pixels per inch. 1024 divided by 300 equals 3.413. Too small to be printed but perfect for what we want.

Click OK to make the change. The dialogue box will disappear and the file on screen will appear to shrink in size. Hit Ctrl+0 (zero) to maximise the file on screen. Have a good look at the picture and make sure you are happy with it. When you are SAVE AS.

DO NOT SAVE.

SAVE and SAVE AS operate slightly differently. Choosing SAVE AS will create a new file which is what we want because we do not want to lose the large 8 x 12 file which we may want to print someday.

A new dialogue box will appear when you choose SAVE AS. Select the location where you want this new file to be kept.

Name the file like this:
WCCxxyy-MM-Title.jpeg where xx is the month of the competition, yy is the year and MM is the members two digit membership number.

For example Pete (who is member number 14) wants to enter the June comp in 2009 with a picture called ”Stunner” and another picture called ”Awesome”.
He would name his files like this:

WCC0609-14B-Awesome.jpeg

The A after the member number is simply the first of his two allowed images and B is the second.

Under the FORMAT drop down box select jpeg.

Hit OK to save.
When you do this another dialogue box will appear asking you how much compression you want to apply to the file. Choose a number from 10 to 12 in the quality box and hit OK.

That’s it! You’re done.

All you have to do now is email your pictures to comp@waverleycameraclub.org before the deadline.

Up to 2 images can be submitted per comp and they can be either colour, monochrome or creative/experimental. There is only one digital comp which means that all styles will be competing against each other.

In the example above the final image size turns out to be 1024 x 683 pixels. It’s not 1024 x 768 but that’s absolutely fine. If we were to make the image 768 pixels high it would scale the side to side measurement to 1151 pixels across which is too big and will be rejected. If you have a picture that is portrait format then the process is exactly the same except when you change the pixel dimensions. Instead of changing the width as we did in the example above we have to change the height.

As a rule of thumb you should always change the longest dimension. If the longest dimension is the width that means the picture is in the landscape format and you should change the pixel dimension to 1024. If the height is the longest dimension then you need to change it to 768 pixels high. If you follow the steps outlined above then a 2400 pixel (8 inch wide) x 3600 pixel (12 inch high) image will be scaled down to 768 high x 512 wide. Where it gets a little tricky is when you have an image which is square or nearly square. If your image is square then you will need to resize it to 768 pixels high. This will result in an image which is 768 x 768. If you resize it to 1024 x 1024 it will be rejected for being too large.

The maximum size for any image is 1024 wide x 768 high.

Pete Davies

All you Vista users out there can have the blog updates come straight to your desktop via the sidebar. To do this you will need to do the following:

1. On the sidebar, not the taskbar at the bottom (where the clock, weather etc is displayed) add the news ticker twice. You’ll need one for the WCC Blog and another for the WCC Tech blog. You can use one ticker if you wish for all feeds but I use two to keep them seperate.

2. Navigate to the WCC blog http://wccmonthlynewsletter.blogspot.com/ and click the posts pull down menu under subscribe to WCC news. In the menu that appears select ‘atom’.

3. In the new window that appears under ‘Waverley Camera Club Members Information Blog’, click ’subscribe to this feed’.

4. In the new window that appears click the ’subscribe’ button.

5. The first window should reappear and it should have ‘You have successfully subscribed to this feed’ in there.

6. Go to your Vista desktop and in one of the newstickers that you installed in the side bar, hovver the mouse pointer over it and select the small spanner to enter the ticker options.

7. In the options, in the pull down menu, select the WCC feed you subscribed to and close the options.

8. repeat these steps for the Tech Help Blog http://wcctechhelp.blogspot.com/ on the other news ticker and you will now receive the updates direct to your desktop.

There has been a request from the VAPS Newsletter Editor regarding email addresses, please ensure that if you haven’t received a VAPS newsletter and you should have, you inform him ASAP. If required please notify a WCC committee member who can pass on any changes for you. Please read on……..

This is the request from VAPS……

VAPS Newsbrief editor, Barrie Attwood, reported 30 Newsbrief emails bounced-back in February and we would appreciate your help to contact people who did not receive their February issue. Perhaps a line could be included in your club newsletter asking your members to make sure that Barrie has been advised of any change in their current email address, or to simply remind people to empty their email box in order to admit incoming mail.

We are hesitant to delete people from the email list, but repeated bounce-backs cause unnecessary additional work. If an address repeatedly sends an error message it will be deleted from the distribution list. Your help in this matter would be appreciated.