Information Technology
August 9, 2001
Just west of Georgetown, Australia
We take a lot of digital pictures everyday, but only a couple make it back to the web site. The video cameras we are using to capture the action are also equipped with memory cards to store any still photographs we want to take. This is great since we don’t have to drag a fourth or fifth camera around with us as we ride our bikes (we have the cameras strapped around our necks as we ride and they jab us in the ribs as they swing about under us. More cameras, more jabs).
When we come back to our computers at night it’s an easy matter to take the memory cards out of the video camera and transfer them to the waiting computer slot. The slot allows the digital picture information to be read by the computer, just as if you had put in a CD.
Here’s where our work finally begins. The detail on the photos is quite remarkable and the photos saved are quite large in size. They often start at greater than 150K. This is far too much memory required for us to send photos efficiently so we have to play with them somewhat and bring them down to 35K or less.
To do this we take the photo over to a program called Photoshop and highlight only the necessary part of the photo for our needs. Then we might increase the contrast or the color saturation to improve the quality of the image. After that we take the photo over to another program called Fireworks 2 because it’s still way too big. There we can reduce the size of the picture and compress the photo automatically down to the size we need to send to you.
Hope you’re enjoying them.
Todd