Send in Your Photos and Reports

We would like the Photo Album to be where members can see what others have been doing, and a good place for new and prospective members to see some of our trips and activities. We welcome members sharing their photographs and reports about trips they participate in. Many photoshops as well as CVS, Kinkos and Walmart will now produce or convert regular photos to electronic form on a CD. Lately it seems that everyone has a digital cameras, which makes it even easier for members to contribute to the photo album.

Trip Reports:
If you have any trip reports or stories that you would like to share with the membership, contact the Communications Chair or the Chapter Reporter and Photographer. We really would like to hear from you. A special insert is being considered for inclusion with some of the Gazette newsletters, and we know that there are some good stories out there.

Guidelines:
In the case of photographs for the website, we need them also, and a few guidelines are offered. In order to make the event photos attractive, we would like photos that tell a simple story. The photos should have context with the event. A closeup head shot of some member might be interesting to you, but not to someone who does not know the person or where the photo was taken. Show the person in relation to their surroundings. An example, if extreme, is if a rock climber is top roping off a cliff, a photo of the cliff showing someone clinging to 50 feet of vertical cliff is more interesting than just a photo of the persons face pressed against a hard rock. If you want viewers to appreciate that "Jack or Jill" is the brave person in the photo, then take a second overall photo of the 5.8 route on the cliff. So now the viewer knows the context of the close up photo, and appreciates why there is a face pressed against a hard rock.

When you take photos, horizontal photos are preferred to vertical photos. If it is a great artistic photo that frames better vertically, thats OK, but for all the rest, the horizontal photo works best on web pages. The reason....when you view the photo album and click from one photo to the next, a vertical photo requires you to scroll down to see the completed photo each time a new page comes up. This makes for a lot of unnecessary mouse work. That is why you will see almost all of my ( webmaster) photos in the 640x480 pixel horizontal format.

Group Photos:
If the photographer only takes one or two photos of an event, a group shot is also welcome for the photo album. If you can stage the photo in context with the event, do so. Nice examples would be on a mountain ridge with mountains in the background. Or oceanside, but with a little of the shoreline or waves in the background. If hiking in the woods and some feature of the hike is available, eg. an old growth tree, include that in the group photo. And of course photos are best when shooting with the Sun at your back.

If you have a group photo where faces might be too small to be seen in a reduced photo, send the full size photo, I will make a dual page like done on this group photo.

Send the Best:
If you take a large selection of photos of an event, cull out the worst of the selection. If you have several of one scene, just send the best photo, not all of them. Do not send blurry photos or ones that are obviously badly over or under exposed. To ensure compatibility, file extensions should be either jpg (preferred) or png. (Try to avoid gif or bmp format.)

Recommended Size Photos:
Note that the files in your digital camera may be huge, as large as 200 kb to 2.5 mb. This size image is way too large to use on our web site. They take too much time to download and display on a dial-up connection, and will be too large to display on a normal size monitor screen. Also I (your webmaster) only have a dial up connection and can not receive megabytes of digital photos with my email. I can, but get very testy waiting for photos to clear before getting the rest of my email. I am also limited to total email storage at my email address, which is less than you would suspect. A typical 6 megapixel digital camera will produce, at the highest jpeg resolution, a 2.5 megabyte photo, which will take about 12 minutes to download. Multiply that by how many photos people typically send, and you will understand.

Yes, there is a small segment of the Internet population (about 20%) that still has access through dialup connections. This is not a cutting-edge web site and therefore it is designed for less than cutting-edge broadband access. We want everyone with access to the internet to enjoy our site. Here is the latest PEW study on adoption of the Internet, which gives statistics on how people are accessing the Internet.

Try to reduce the the size of the photos before emailing them to the webmaster. The ideal photos should be about 640x480 pixels and about 50 -150 kb is size. A little larger is OK, and that way I can crop the photos if necessary. When they get over 300 kb, I would like them reduced. Whatever size they are, they will be reduced to 640x480 pixels for use on the chapter website. Smaller ones will be put in, as is. If you have large photos and do not know how to reduce the digital images or do not have the software, there are many free programs on the Internet that are easy to use. Here are my recommendations. Keep on reading for more solutions.

How to Send in Large Photos:
If your photos are too large to email to me and you do not have the means or time to reduce the size of photos, there are two alternatives. One alternative for images taken directly from a digital camera, is to copy them to a CD (referred to as burning), and mail the CD to the webmaster at the below address. Do not worry about packaging too much. I use 9"x12" manila mailing envelopes folded twice over the CD with two regular stamps. Solid plastic CD holders are not necessary and only require more postage. (A CD is very tough. Try breaking one, with safety glasses on, to see how tough they are.) I can also scan negatives, slides and printed photos (up to 8"x10") for you, if that is what you have. Please include a self addressed return envelope if you want me to send them back, or we can arrange for the negatives, slides, or print photos to be returned in person at some activity.

FTP uploading
Another option for transmittng large photos is to 'ftp' the photos to our “photobin” directory. This method works best if you have broadband (ie. cable, DSL, or fiber) internet access. “Photobin” is a temporary directory/folder that will be used to hold photos that are pending installation on the web site. This directory/folder can also be used to upload large text files or stories for inclusion on the web site. Contact the webmaster for the password if you want to use this method of contributing photos to our site. Note this method only eliminates problems dealing with my email, I still have to download the photos from the “photobin” directory to edit them and integrate them into the web site. So if you have megabytes of photos, try to resize them, or cull them, so that I do not have to deal with more than 60 megabytes or so. If you do not know how to use an 'ftp' program, I have included directions on how to use four free ftp programs, depending on how computer savy you are. The most popular free ftp program is FileZilla. Another less complicated program is DeluxeFTP, and a "so simple it's stupid" program is WhizFTP. Another method using the IE6 browser is similar to WhizFTP. Take your pick, or try all four. If all else fails I will give you assistance.

Send to:
Michael Krabach
747 Nate Whipple Hwy
Cumberland,RI, 02864-3354.