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photos were all taken with a simple digital camera, Olympus 340R,
which has been my first (happy) experience with an instant satisfaction
type camera where high quality gives way to expedient publishing
on the world wide web.
I
have found that as with 'real' cameras it pays to use a tripod.
And I now keep a mini tripod attached, which also aids camera
grip.
The digital darkroom has opened new horizons
for chemical free subtle photo retouching and image altering.
I
soon found the panorama stitching software QuickStitch from
Enroute, and began using it. Once you decide between perspective
or cylindrical, the program merges 2-3-4 or more individual
shots into one panorama. These will need some cropping and minor
retouching. The contrast banding is a tech problem that requires
bracket exposures, some new cameras do this automatically. This
allows a 1 mega-pixel camera to include much more digital information
in each photograph.
Photo
storage on the road is a problem because one is dependent on
any number of cables, power supplies, and the security of your
notebook. It seems that a zip drive or a CD-RW on board with
multiple mail backs of data is the only SAFE WAY to go, and
remember some extra cables too! Also FORGET about the serial
port download, it's WAY TOO SLOW. Use a PCMCIA to SmartMedia
reader instead. Test ALL your hardware and software BEFORE you
leave. Burn an APPS cd with ALL your critical PHOTO and CAMERA
software on it. Special thanks to the Net Techno
who found a copy of Camedia overnight when mine crashed!
Photoshop
5.5 was used to squeeze the graphics down in size from an average
400 kb and to make the thumbnails. I prefer to retouch with
Corel Photohouse5 which has a simple interface to a set of Corel
Draw tools, all of the retouching was done in small increments
of just 3% to 6% change to contrast, brightness, intensity
and sharpness.
Remember
to do your editing on a bit mapped file [.bmp - .tif] and just
save once to a jpeg file. I want to buy a 3+ mega-pixel camera
soon. sdw
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