I can’t believe it is August already. Things have been a little hectic around here lately with July being consumed with the Bix7 race and probably more disrupting is I accepted a new job opportunity within my company. So now I have the stress of getting up to speed on my new job while spending every available minute organizing and documenting for a hand off of my previous duties. But with all that going on, I did find some time to look into something that has been circling around the noggin for awhile. Let’s start with a quick experiment. Take a look at this picture from the previous post on bobcats at Wildlife Prairie Park.
Okay, now take a gander at this image:
So, what were the main differences that you noticed? If you said the first one was larger then you are both correct and possess a passion for the obvious. If you also noticed the crop was slightly different then again correct and your analysis skills are starting to rev up. Lastly, if you noticed the second one has a slightly different black tone and the vibrancy was reduced slightly then you have started developing your keen photography eye… oh, and correct again. However, none of these things were part of the experiment. The answer is actually much more “smug” than that and can be found after the jump.
Okay, let me provide another shot of our bobcat.
In this particular shot we have taken the size deficiency out of the equation. In fact, let’s go crazy!
So here we have 4 pictures of varying sized without noticeable loss of detail. In fact, the cat actually looks better in the larger size. But there’s a kicker to all of this. How much storage space do you think the last three photos cost me on my blog site? The answer is ZERO. The images are actually being hosted off of a photography website account I recently acquired from Smugmug.com. You might have notice Linda and I enjoy photography as a hobby and actually spend a lot of time out on shoots and on the computer processing the results with a host of software tools. We really have not had a good way to show off the results. Not to mention, putting them on the blog or god forbid Linda’s Facebook account required us to manipulate the crap out of the original to get it down to an appropriate size for users to appreciate. After a bunch of research on the numerous photo friendly websites out there it was decided Smugmug would be the winner. A note of thanks to our friend Stewey who originally turned us on to that service. Although the construction process is still in flight, our new photo gallery website can be found at Eddiesoft.smugmug.com. The beauty of this new site is we can upload a full size photograph at the quality/detail we want and be able to link to a variety of sizes to fit specific needs. It also allows our web readers the opportunity to see the full size picture if they want to see what it really looks like before reducing the hell out of it for the blog sites. To put it in perspective, this blog’s photos usually run in the average range of 85-105K. The image that was actually uploaded to our smugmug gallery is actually 2.2M. Now, in this particular case, the full size is probably to large to readily view on the web, but from a printing perspective, it gives the best overall look. If you are curious, here’s a link to a smugmungous bobcat (note, your browser may reduce it for you, but you can zoom it by clicking it). And of course, you can always go directly to the specific gallery and navigate through the various pictures on your own (at at any size you want).
I am actually pretty excited about this and actually spent a number of hours testing Smugmug out to make sure it could do what I wanted it to do. So far, it has passed with flying colors. Oh, and it also resolves a serious issue I was having uploading images to this blog site – essentially Go Daddy sucks when it comes to trying to FTP through satellite connections. Google is flooded with complaints on this and neither Go Daddy or the satellite providers are willing to fix it. The upload to smugmug went fast and without failure where the Go Daddy FTP can’t keep a connection going for over 30 seconds.
So be sure and check out our photo galleries at Eddiesoft.smugmug.com (comments welcome!!). Please mind the construction dust as we get everything spiffed up.
Wildlife Intrigued 
