mld, May 5, 2002 at 3:56:09 PM CEST

Art Car Pics Tech Notes

These pics were all shot with an Agfa 1280. This camera was pretty hot stuff when I got it a few years back, though it's no longer bleeding edge gear.

Resolution was set on 780S, and I mostly left the camera on automatic. The cars came by too quickly to have time to mess to much with manual settings. If there's one thing I don't like much about the camera, it's the relatively long time that it takes for it to write to the memory card, and rest itself for the next shot. I did manually focus on a few of the pics.

As the day wore on, it became progressively cloudier. Not actually dark, but the light was diffused, and pics of the taller vehicles lacked the contrast they might have had against a clear blue sky, especially if the car was light colored. Take a look at this pic of the ZebraCar as an example.

The pics were all closely cropped. Most of the enhancement work was done in the simple built-in editor that comes with ACDSee. Some of the ones that needed more work I took into Paint Shop Pro 6.0. They were sharpened about 50%, had the gamma popped up to about 1.5, and the brightness and contrast jumped about 25 and 30 each. Those are general numbers. I edited them in roughly chronological order, so the gamma numbers tended to go up as I went. They were all then saved with the jpg compression set to about 70%. This got them down to about 10% of their original size, in combination with the cropping and resizing

Here's a sample before and after. I did compress the before a bit, getting it down to about half the former size, just to make it easy on the bandwidth challenged, like me. :-(

I didn't really spend too much time on each pic. Once I found the range of values that worked well enough, I just started slamming the pics out. There were over two hundred, after all. I'm sure anyone that wanted to spend more time could tweak any one individual pic a bit better.

The Art Cars 1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8 The Art Bikes The Art Folk Technical Notes

 

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mld, April 1, 2002 at 4:06:00 AM CEST

Springtime in Texas - Wildflowers

It's that time of year. The wildflowers are beginning to bloom. I took these pics today with my Agfa 1280, during a walk I took this morning. I have the pictures in a larger size and higher resolution, so if you'd like one in a desktop wallpaper size, mail me (use the link over there on the right) and let me know what size you need. I don't know what kind of flowers are in the top pic. The ones on the right are Indian Paintbrush, and I think the ones below here are primroses, but I don't know for sure.

 

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