Afternoon in the sun & snow

butch · December 28, 2010, 11:03:41 PM

Still trying to figure out the new camera, spent about 4 hours south of Burnside this afternoon trying to utilize the remaining snow. As usual I moved around depending on the sun and NB/SB.

First up is a SB stretching out at Dead Ox Hollow. Later just north of KD Tower is another SB. Then a NB crossing over in the shadows of the KD Tower cut-this angle is only available in the winter. And the last is another SB just below the Dead Ox Hollow crossing-what made this one interesting is that it was poking along and right after I took this picture, as I was waving to the crew another SB on Main 1 blew by like this one was sitting still.

E.M. Bell · December 29, 2010, 06:05:52 PM

I am impressed! The new camera seems to be doing well...I knew you had the talent, just needed the hardware to back it up. Get a tree filter, and your good to go

VirginiaSouthern · December 29, 2010, 07:07:30 PM

Great job Butch. I'd say the camera and you are getting along quite well. This is a great series of pics.

butch · December 30, 2010, 12:14:11 AM

Thanks guys, one of the things that I've got to figure out is can I make the pix small enough to upload without reducing the quality of the pic. Something to do with starting with a 7 meg file I'm sure.

Ed Fury · December 30, 2010, 01:07:29 AM

What program are you using to re-size them smaller? A lot of programs have extra settings when re-sizing. Sometimes these are buried or hidden in sub menus. Usually they are automatically set to compress the files as they reduce the images dimensions. This compression leaves artifacts and makes the images blurry. Adjust the slider bars to 100% quality or some similar setting should reduce the image dimensions while maintaining most of the actual pictures quality.

butch · December 30, 2010, 09:52:31 PM

Ed,

I usually use MS Picture Manager. I'm going to try making the initial file size smaller. It seems to work ok if I'm not doing a 90% reduction.

thanks,

ba

E.M. Bell · December 30, 2010, 11:51:15 PM

Unless you are really doing something off the wall, reducing the resolution of the image down from what ever it comes out of the camera at, to around 72 DPI can drastically cut down the file size for web use.

For Instance, a file straight from my camera is 350 dpi, and in the final steps of processing for web use, I reduce that to 72, the size the image to roughly 1024 wide for a horizontal crop, and 850 wide for a vertical crop, then save it has a "high" jpeg.

Matt L · December 31, 2010, 01:56:01 PM

Quote from: butch on December 28, 2010, 11:03:41 PM
Still trying to figure out the new camera, spent about 4 hours south of Burnside this afternoon trying to utilize the remaining snow. As usual I moved around depending on the sun and NB/SB.

First up is a SB stretching out at Dead Ox Hollow. Later just north of KD Tower is another SB. Then a NB crossing over in the shadows of the KD Tower cut-this angle is only available in the winter. And the last is another SB just below the Dead Ox Hollow crossing-what made this one interesting is that it was poking along and right after I took this picture, as I was waving to the crew another SB on Main 1 blew by like this one was sitting still.

Greats shots! I really like the picture quality from your new camera.

butch · December 31, 2010, 11:29:38 PM

Thanks Matt.

Emmett, I don't have the option to change dpi with the MS program, I just select the % to reduce the image. What I did today was reduce the size of the file the camera creates from 7-8 meg to 2.5-3ish meg. Then I only reduced it once on the laptop. See if these from this afternoon at Copper Creek look better: The only NS I saw ran nb on the old Clinchfield right as I got there. But I was excited because as I came in, I had heard a sb on the NS low line. But it was a CSX train which interestingly, got hung up at the Boone siding because CSX didn't have anywhere at Frisco to put it. It was still sitting crewless when I headed home. I will skip the "is it foreign power on NS when it's actually a CSX train excising trackage rights" discussion and just throw in a shot from trackside by the Clinchfield bridge. Do these look better, same, or worse? thanks

Ed Fury · January 01, 2011, 01:00:11 AM

From what I can tell the top and bottom photos look just fine. The middle one does look off to me. A lot of my photos seem to turn out the same exact way. I am not sure if it's image stabilization or motion blur or the camera not auto focusing properly or camera operator error when mine come out like that. I don't think it is from resizing the image smaller though..