Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Photo taken with a (Sony super steadyshot DSC T30 7.2 mega pix) the original size was 3072 x 2304 but has been resized by photobucket to a maximum size of 1024 x 768, shame really but i dont want to pay for their pro service.

No special lighting no tripod.
indoors with normal household incandecent lighting ,point and shoot with Macro at about 5 inch with flash , no infill...

Male Variable Kingsnake

Paul.

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www.uk-hybrids.com

Paul,

Great shots, but I thought I would give a couple of comments.

First of all, you might try and get a little lower down relative to the snake. Getting lower down towards the animals "level" will help give your shots a bit more "personality".

Secondly, I don't agree with the larger-is-better philosophy of internet picture posting.

Most people aren't looking at your pics on a 1600x1200 flatscreen like I am. Most people are using 1024x768 or even less. Therefore, they can't even see your whole photo at once and therefore can't appreciate it. Furthermore, I think your photos look good at even smaller sizes. Good sharp photos resize very well.

Also, big photos load slowly. Yes, I have a very fast cable connection, but many people don't and it isn't fun waiting for giant files to download.

Just for comparison, I took the liberty of resizing your files to show you what can be acheived. I simply opened it in Photoshop elements and saved it at a jpg compression setting of 7 (out of 10) rather than at 10 (the highest quality setting).

Your original shot is 1024x740 and is 546Kb. I increased the compression and resaved it and it is now 145Kb (4x smaller!).

Here are the two versions together. Can you tell the 545Kb file from the 145Kb file? Right click on them if you can't.

At the resolution of a computer monitor, you can't tell the difference. Therefore the extra 4x file size gets you nothing.
Yes, if you look REALLY close you can spot some differences, but to be fair, that is because I had to resize your jpg which reduces the quality. If I had started from the original like you did, it would have been identical on screen, just smaller.

Then I resized the photo down to 800x578 and 122Kb and it comes out like this. Still looks great at this size, fits on most monitors without scrolling and loads much faster.

Just some thoughts for future consideration.
Look forward to seeing more shots, regardless of file size!
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Chris Harrison
San Antonio, Texas

I agree that the resizing doesnt make to much difference to the average browser and yes the smaller file size does help the users that have a slower internet conection.
In reality i take far to many photo's to resize them all so just end up uploading a nice pic or 2 into photo bucket for people to see, mind you i do reduce the the quality to about 70% to make it easier on the speed.
dont get me wrong,the constructive critizm is great and you showed that to great effect.... nice one.
I have on afew occasions reduced and resized / resampled then saved without making a backup first in my rush to get them into cyberspace lol, which resulted in images that were no good to blowup and print for my personal use,now thats a bummber.

Paul.
Not the best quality and again another 1020+ file but i like how weird it looks.
again another point and shoot, with no special setup.
Leonis Variable x Leonis Variable (Love Bite)

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www.uk-hybrids.com

Nice photos! If you are running Windows XP, and want to resize any photo (it renames the smaller photo so as to not overwrite the file), try this Microsoft download.

Microsoft Resizer

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Lamar, Debbie, Nathaniel and Iggi :>~