Photo Layout for Blogs

I can never decide. I change my mind constantly about what I like and don't. My latest dilemma has been how to show photos on this blog. I have it narrowed down to three ways. First the old school link to my website that shows a little flash slideshow. Example 1. This allows for a fancier presentation but you have to actually leave the blog and take a little time to get downloaded.

The second is pictobrowser. This one allows me to upload to Flickr and then use a keyword from them to show a slideshow viewer here. Best part about this one is takes so little room to display the photos and its very easy to upload.






Finally I could put them on the blog directly. This is the way I am leaning toward now. I believe it gives a little cleaner look but it may be the most time consuming way to put the photos on. It also forces me to combine two vertical photos together to get a uniform look.







So which method do you prefer?

Printing and Resolution

First off, normally my customers recieve CDs or DVDs of their event. I am a strong believer in allowing the customer to purchase CD or DVD instead of charging by photo, but that is another story for another day. What is important is that you get to choose if you want either CDs or DVDs. I used to only offer DVD's but their are some cons to that. If you wanted to take your DVD to Wal-Greens or Wal-Mart, or wherever they may have a printing kiosk a lot of them don't have anything to read the DVD media. CD's on the other hand work fine, but you will normally have many CD's for a wedding.

What should I do BEFORE I get my DVD/CDs. I recommend you download Google photo application called Picasa here: http://picasa.google.com/. Picasa is great for viewing and organizing lots of photos quickly.


What you should do when you get your DVD/CDs? First thing to do is import them to your hard drive. This is by far the best thing to do. The photos may be slow to appear on your computer screen if you are trying to view them directly from the DVD/CDs since they are high resolution files. For instance, each full resolution photo usually has more data on it than a 4 minute mp3 music file! I also include a small resolution version of each photo, in a seperate folder within the DVD/CDs so you can view, email, upload to the web faster.

What is the difference between high resolution and low resolution? Size. The resolution of a digital photo is expressed by pixels (width x height). A full resolution photos will vary depending on numerous factors such as the megapixels of the camera, or if the photo has been cropped. An uncropped photo from my Nikon D300 is 4288 x 2848 pixels. If you multiply those together guess what you get. 12.2 million....which is 12.2 megapixels. A low resolution version of the same photo could be anything smaller than that, but the point is to make it a smaller FILE SIZE so it can be viewed faster, emailed faster, downloaded faster, ect. I usually make my low resolution photos about 1000 pixels at the long end. So if it is uncropped or I have kept the same aspect ratio the file will be 1000 x 664. This is plenty big to view on a computer. Let's look at a comparison. Here a low resolution photo. And here is the high resolution version. Now while you may think the low res version is plenty big enough to print, it is....but it isn't. Really it all depends on what size you want. The resolution of a print is expressed in pixels per inch (PPI). When printing a standard 4x6 print you want 300 PPI. Lower PPI equals lower print quality (however this is debatable as you may not actually see much difference between 200 PPI and 300 PPI). So is the low res version good enough to print a 4x6 photo at 300 PPI? Lets do the math.

4 inches x 300 ppi= 1200.
6 inches x 300 ppi= 1800.

So we need a digital photo 1200 x 1800 pixels to print a 4x6 photo at 300 PPI. The low res version doesn't quite cut it for a high quality print.

To learn more about PPI, DPI (often interchangable with PPI), print size requirements, megapixels, ect. check out http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=177

A new chapter begins...

We have finally gotten completely moved. I remember when I thought it wouldn't take very long to move completely out of our old house....I was wrong. My internet access is finally fully back (whew), but still no TV. I could actually do without TV (until baseball season anyway) but I MUST have internet. I had kept internet at the old house leaving my computer there, so I would have access but then my keyboard broke so I could do very much of anything. That has put me behind a little on editing some stuff. Its nice to finally have everything I need in one place again, instead of always needing something that is at the other place. So with that I shall get to editing some pics and eventually post some of my latest stuff on here.