Glad you got out and did some fishin. Always nice to just go catch a couple.

A few tips for photos.

When you get your picture from digital camera or a scanner, it's going to be a large size, pixel wise and file size wise. For example, say your camera shoots at 1200x1600 pixels. Think of that as 12 inches by 16 inches if you printed it out or looked at it on your screen, it's big! The file size is going to be around 200k. In megabytes that is .2 megabytes. It's a big file for the internet and for people who are on 56k lines.

Now think a little about resolution on your monitor. If you have a nice 19 inch monitor, you can run it at 1200x1600 resolution. This equates directly to the 1200x1600 that your camera. So that pic should take up your entire screen. Now in the real world most people have 15 or 17 inch monitor and run them at 800x600 pixels. So that 1200x1600 pic would be going way off the screen in that case.

Ideally on the internet your picture should be between 300 and 500 pixels wide. I post most of my pics at 425 pixels wide. I don't worry about the heighth. I let the software that I use figure out the height based on the width. Every image editing program should have an option to resize your pics. Within that option it should have something that says "maintain aspect ratio". This means that when you resize from 1200x1600 and you say you want the width to be 400, it will automatically adjust the height to about 533 pixels. Thus the ratio of width to heigth stays the same and the pic doesn't look distorted.

Another good tip is to use the crop feature before you resize the pic. If you have a pic at 1200x1600 and you and the fish are only taking up the middle of the pic, no one really cares about the background (unless they're trying to poach your spot :-) ) But seriously.. If you use the crop feature on the 1200x1600 image and frame you and the fish in the middle, the resulting file might be like 800x1100 for example. Then you do your resize, and the pic winds up looking really good as if it was perfectly centered and up close. If you just take the original 1200x1600 and resize it, you wind up looking much smaller. Make sense?

I love seeing the pics on the site so if you have pic questions, just post them and I can probably help.

-Rob

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