I was asked last year to give a presentation on “My Interests” at the Morriston Camera Club, which I then forgot about. I was reminded recently that this was about to happen in two weeks! Initially I had intended to give this presentation on the Maritime Volunteer Service. However, since I recently resigned from this it would not have been appropriate to have continued with this. I have now had to hurriedly put together something on my newer interest – The National Coastwatch Institution, or NCI.
Obviously I do not yet have a suitable collection of photographs of the NCI, and have therefore had to raid their web-site, ( nciwormshead.org.uk ). Most of the photographs there are too small a resolution to be of use, so I decided yesterday to take a run down to Rhossilli and try and get some of my own. Inevitably Gwen (our dog) loves being with me when I am on watch at The Worm, so she had to come with me. As I have found out many times before, she has an uncanny knack of appearing in the photographs, a bit like a certain cartoon character in the Western Mail, or Alfred Hitchcock in his films. I managed to Photoshop her out of some, but she appears next to the child’s pushchair in the first photograph.
Here are a couple of the shots I took anyway;-
Gwen managed to get her nose into this one as well. This is the unedited version…
Despite numerous signs and warnings, tourists regularly get cut off. Considerably less though since the NCI have been active.
Was it the Maritime Volunteer Service that used the Newfoundland dogs as rescue dogs? My dad was on about donating money to one of the coast guard services and I was telling him about it but couldn’t remember which one it was.
Also, before you upload your photos what size do you shrink them to first? Chris told me to try and keep them to around 50KB. Sometimes this is really hard though, as depending on the complexity of the photo and how much I have fiddled with it I can end up having to sacrifice the quality a lot. If I do my final save in “save for web” option in Photoshop, in order to get the file size to 50KB I may have to have to set the quality to 20% or less. This can result in a fairly pixelated photo which destroys the object of the exercise in my opinion.
Yours always look good though so was just wondering if you did anything different or whether you simply sacrifice the smaller download requirment and quicker speed for quality presentation.
Hi Alex. To answer your questions, the MVS is a smallish charity, its main role being to promote maritime skills on an island that is losing these essential skills. Many of the units also work closely with local communities in order to assist the emergency services (search & rescue, acting as safety boats at events, etc.). They do work with the Newfoundland dogs – which are based in Gloucester strangely enough -but opportunities for doing this are limited. They have had more television experience than actual events when they co-operate in order to work in a safety capacity. In part, the reason I resigned from the MVS was its lack of structure and direction.
With regard to re-sizing photographs, I always work in a RAW format, which gives the greatest detail and flexibility to manipulate images in Photoshop. This may not apply to you, but the way I work is to open the photographs in Bridge (the icon at the top of the Photoshop screen, to the left of the word “Workspace”. From there I go to “Open With”, which then takes me back into an initial screen which alows me to do some basic manipulation – contrast, levelling, colour temp, etc. The photograph is then opened into the normal Photoshop screen. The first thing I need to do then is to go to “Image” then “Mode”. Since i shoot in 16 bit I then need to reduce this to 8 bit. This also allows you to finally save the image as a Jpeg if you are initially working in RAW. You may not have to do this, depending on the camera you are using, and how it is set up. Make whatever other adjustments you want in Photoshop, (and it is always worth going to “Filters” then “Unsharp Mask”, and sharpen the image a little. You will need to experiment with this, but generally I sharpen the image over 3 to 5 pixels. Play with it to see what best suits your needs, but don’t over-sharpen as this can look horrid). Then finally go “Image” again, then “Image size”. I reduce the resolution to 72 pixels per inch, then the “Pixel Dimensions” to about 600 at the widest point, which allows you to fit it on to the screen.
I notice that, for instance, the shot of Matt lighting the fire is only 150 pixels square. Trying playing around with this process and see if it improves things for you.
For any Photoshop expert who might happen to read this – I am still very much a novice with Photoshop. If you have any better ideas on how to do thing, I am willing to learn
Oh, and I should have added that when you finally go to save the image it may come up with a box asking you to save as a certain quality. I generally use the maximum on this, but between 8 & 12 seems to work best.