First RP Upload

[Gage O'Dell]

I'm trying to upload the pic on RP but i cant get it in there range of pixels without it messing up the quality. Can anybody out there help.

[JCagle]

You'll have to crop the image down to the size and then resize it from the original size. The entire thing looks to be a little bit blurry and soft. Without it being cropped they will say there is too much dead space in front of the engine. They also like shots that are brightly lit with clear skies (think a summer day with clear skies and big puffy white clouds in the background). They may also say high sun on this one. Notice how the trucks and the front plow are obscured in shaddow. The plow has a shadow on 3/4 of it. Typically in summer months high sun is considered anything that isn't lit well on the entire side. As a guideline between the late spring and early fall the sun will be high in the mid day hours. A good way to tell if the sun is high is to look around and see if shadows hang realy close to the base of the object (like a telephone pole)/ Once the sun gets lower in the sky the shadow will grow. You've got the proper angle down for the lighting and that sort of thing. There are lots of people that get frusterated and give up before they realy get started with RP. I gave up on them a while back, but when I first started shooting trains I had shots that I knew would make it get rejected. Just remember to learn from each shot!

[Gage O'Dell]

Yeah I tried what you said, and the only thing that they said was poor image quality. So now im trying to find that i can get within there pixel range and make it look less blurry. Thanks for the help!!

[JCagle]

I had a chance to download the picture tonight and look at the exif data to see if I could figure out what was up with the poor quality of the photo. I thought it could be one of two things, but wanted to see which one it was. I thought it might have been the ISO but you are set to 64 which is slower than 100. The next suspect was digital zoom. It looks like you soomed past the limit of the optical zoom and got into the digital zoom. Optical zoom is simply using the lenses in your lens to bring the subject closer. When you use optical zoom it does not distort the image. When you get past the limit of the optical zoom digital zoom kicks in. Digital zoom is a trade off. You trade image quality for closeness. Without getting too technical it works on the same principal of putting a magnifying glass over a picture to make it appear bigger. Flaws that are too small for the eye to notice in optical zoom become exaggerated. A good example of this would be to look at a newspaper print ad from arms length and then bring it in to right in front of your nose, When you get it closer you'll start to notice the dots of colored ink that make up the image. Those dots would be the equivalent of the pixels in your camera.