Pixels, Megapixels and Size OR Why My Email Photos are HUGE!!!

Megapixels - millions of pixels or picture elements. Each pixel is part of the image your camera takes. The millions of them together form a gigantic mosaic to form the image.

The image size really refers to two different concepts:

• the size of the image on a screen or monitor and
• the size of a printed paper photograph

Monitors or computer screens display 72 dots per inch (dpi). So if you want to know how large an image will be on a computer screen, divide both dimensions by 72. For example, suppose you have a digital photo which is 3000 x 2000 pixels or a 6mp image.

3000/72 is about 42 inches and 2000/72 is about 28 inches. So that 6mp image needs a computer screen which is 42 inches wide by 28 inches high.

Did you ever wonder why the photos your friends email you are so big? It's because they are viewing the image on their computer using some program that reduces the picture to a size convenient to the screen. They don't realize the amount of space that image needs on your screen when you view it in an email.

When you go to print a photo either at home or commercially think about dividing by 200 instead of 72. When you print on paper the common value used is 200 dpi for a top quality image. (You may hear 150 or 220 or even 300; it's just different opinions being expressed.)
So that 3000 x 2000 or 6mp image comes out at 15" x 10 ". Now the thing to remember here is that the 15" x 10" represents the LARGEST top quality image you can print. There is no problem at all in printing smaller images - 4x6 inches or 5x6 inches or 8x10 inches or even 11x14 inches. It's when you start getting too much above the 10x15 inch size that you will start noticing that your picture quality suffers.

p.s. You may hear this same discussion with the titles "The Rule of 72" and "The Rule of 200".

Online Photo Album/Gallery - PhotoOnWeb

PhotoOnWeb is a new internet site for your online photo albums. It is a product of VSO Software publisher of VSO PhotoDVD - Photos DVD Slide show software.

It works a little differently than other album sites I've used but I love the results. You download a small program (about 6Mb) and install it. When you run the program you can select to create a new album or open an existing album.
Now select your photos. You can browse your hard drive to find them or you can drag and drop from an open window. Each photo can have its own comments.
Select an album name (which will define the web page name), a description (which will appear on the page) and a template. There are more than 20 templates to choose from: photographic, wedding, model book, holiday, real estate, birthdays, etc. All done? Then Publish your album. Publish connects with the web site. If you are not logged in, you must do so and then the pages are created and uploaded with reasonable speed.

I haven't yet tried hosting the pages on my own ISP web space but they say you can.

It's brand new - I even got to use my name as the login. It's free! There's a 100Mb of storage. And the current version has no ads inserted.
Overall, PhotoOnWeb is very hard to fault!
Take a look at an example I put together of derivations.

Windmill at Mt. Pleasant

I used to do this type of "derivation" using high contrast Kodak B&W litho film (made for the printing industry). Took hours. This was much faster and easier. This type of photo isn't to everyone's liking, but the thing to remember is that you do photography for yourself (unless of course you are photographing someone's wedding, etc.)
If you'd like to see some more of these, take a look at my album at PhotoOnWeb.

Dumpr is a lot of fun!

If you have ever wanted to have people notice your photographs then you would probably like to have them hung in a museum or gallery.
Now you can do just that! Visit Dumpr and you can almost instantly have your photo hung in museum format!
It's really easy too! When you visit Dumpr, you first browse to your photo. It's a good idea to have it resized down to about 800 or 1024 pixels wide. If you have a slower connection, you also want to downsize to improve the upload speed. The finished images are 800x600 pixels so you can get a reasonable 4x6" print from it.



After selecting your image, you choose the museum/gallery format that you prefer by clicking. At the moment there are four options. Once you have selected your image and style, click on the blue Continue button and your photo will be uploaded to their servers.

Once your photo is uploaded you will see it prepared for you. At the top are links to email the photo to your friends, to upload it to your Flickr! account (if you have one) or to save it on your own computer.
As well, you get links to the copy stored on Dumpr's server and a link for your blog. There are also links to attach the photo to your del.icio.us and facebook accounts.

Pixels and Megapixels

What's a megapixel you ask? First, let's just consider a pixel or picture element. A pixel is one of the square "dots" that make up your picture. When you take a picture your camera transfers the contents of a rectangular sensor to the memory card in the camera.
Every rectangle has a height and width. Suppose the camera sensor is 3000 units wide and 2000 units high (where each unit is a pixel). Simple arithmetic gives an area of length x width = 3000 x 2000 = 6,000,000.
That sensor records 6 million pixels. To keep the numbers under control, a megapixel is 1 million pixels. So our 6 million pixel sensor is a 6 megapixel or 6 mp sensor. And that makes the camera a 6 mp camera.