Post Reply - Pictures Tips, Sizing and Posting. Avatars

Pictures are a very important part of carbine research.
With todays inexpensive point and shoots you can obtain some very detailed pictures.
What the camera sees and your eye see sometimes are two very different things.
sometimes the camera pics up something that you do not see no matter how hard you stare. Sometimes the camera also creates a ghost image. If in doubt take more! Some cameras take very high resolution pictures which is great as you can reduce the size later. 1024x768 is a good starting size whereas 640x 480 would most likely be too small to start with.


Lighting: ample lighting is key. the more light the faster the camera focuses and takes picture.
Outside on a cloudy day I have gotten some excellent pictures. The clouds disperse the light which prevents annoying shadows.
On a bright day in a lightly shaded area also can produce good pictures.

Artificial light: I have had varied results under shop fluorescents or incandescent lighting or halogens and sometimes odd colors. However photo compact fluorescents can be had relatively inexpensive these days. I picked up 4 for 20 shipped. You can put these in articulating desk lamps or clip on utility reflectors.
I like the articulating desk lamps which I picked up in a second had store. I can play with angles to create or remove shadows. With just 2 you can move them in close for plenty of light.
a step up from there would be a light box or disperser shades. this is nothing more than a white material that scatters the light and makes the light go at many angles. This requires more lights at times.

Shadows: ever go nuts looking at the inside of a slide for a mark? I have pulled the lights up a bit and used a quality LED flashlight at an angle so light goes over surface and created mini shadows that the camera picked up even though flooded with light from above. I found additional marks in a Winchester slide this way that I could not see with naked eye.

Picture composure: try to take the picture as straight on as possible, meaning at right angle. this prevents skewing. If you take the same picture of two similar item at two different angles then compare them it almost becomes impossible at times.

Take many and pictures and keep the best ones to edit.
Editing can be done with Microsoft Paint (already installed on PC) or a free program like Picasa. Some may use Photoshop. If using Photoshop try to flatten or remove layers as this sets off false virus alerts with many scanners.

Editing: The first thing I like to do is straighten a picture with editing software. This is a grid that you rotate so as straight lines of the subject are square with the grid.
Crop the picture next. This is in essence trimming out what is not needed around the subject. This removes a lot of unnecessary size to a picture. This speeds uploading as well as time to load for those looking. Besides the coffee table is not relevant to the picture.
For something that is meant to be viewed in a forum you would now reduce the size of the photo to a range suitable for a post. This is where Paint is very handy. There is a check mark to maintain ratio. You can choose to size by pixels or by percentage. Choose Pixels and resize width to 720 (optimal) or up to 800 (max) . If larger most forums resize it down so it serves no purpose but uses bandwidth and storage space.

Hope that helps and please add anything that helps.


Edited by New2brass - Jan 18 2020 at 9:10pm