Stuka Stunt Main Forum · 4 of 4 known posts recovered
Great job! I just wanted to let you know how much I enjoy the pictures you are providing from VSC. Later if you can find the time could you explain what your camera settings are and what you do to the images to prepare for uploading? Again thinks for your efforts.
Tom 
Bill Heher
If it's broke, fix it.
If it aint broke - let me see it for a minute.
My goals are:
Edit
That said, Elwyn's amazing shot of the Belfry Bound and Carl Shoup is the shot of the contest. Posting it along with the other great in the air shots in the thread I started with a few static shots is an example of how collective authorship is better than single authorship--how this medium is more powerful than, dare I say it, Stunt News.
My technology is dated, but it still works. I left a primer on the techniques I have developed in a series of posts covering the Ed Southwick memorial.
The link below will take you to a post which contains a menu of the threads in the Documenting Southwick series, which will present most of what I know.
http://www.clstunt.com/htdocs/dcforum/DCForumID1/7455.html#6
In the rest of that thread you will find links to free image processing software, which is at the core of the work I do. Having a camera and being at the event is half the battle, certainly, but knowing what to do with the files after they are on hard disk and before they get to the server is more important.
This year, I have a new jpeg encoder in Photoshop 7's Save for Web option, which really works at squishing images. That coupled with Len's survey, lead me to change my previous recommendation that images be limited to 400 pixels wide out to 550, which, regardless of how good the tools get, I would say is as wide as you ever need to go if you want your post to be enjoyably readable.
Len says 5 images or so per post at the limit of 50K per image is where he feels a thead begins to bog down for dial up users. I can usually get an image down to 30K per image at the larger 550 size and down to 20 K if I work at it--you have to encode these things a couple of times in some cases to see which set of image processing give you the best results. So I can feel comfortable with as many as 8 images at 30K (240K) and know they will load as fast as 5 images at 50K.
The driving philosophy is simple. Never ship a pixel to the server (or back to the users) that does not contribute to the image of the airplane in the shot if you can avoid it.
I use the camera to pre-crop the shot and look through the LED screen on the back to make sure the wings are angled enough that I get the highest airplane to background ratio that I can--unless, like the Belfry Bound and the Sweet Sweep this year, I am trying deliberately to document the planform. Angling the wings and leaning about 20-30 degrees gives you the most airplane per view inside a rectangular format. I then back off a bit to give myself some room and take the shot.
Once an image is on hard disk, I open it in the photo editor, drag a selection rectangle from the center of the airplane out to one corner so I can just see the two moving edges of the selection outside the visible parts of the airplane in that direction. Then I let go of the mouse, move out a tiny bit further and then click to begin the actual selection, dragging in the opposite diagonal. When I can just see that all parts of the airplane in question are within the bounds of the selection rectangle, I do a 'Crop' command and thus throw away all the grass in the courtyard that we all know is there anyway. Then I simply take whatever it is that is left and do an 'Image Scale' down to 550 horizontal, putting all the images into the same format for easy readability of the text. Then I fool with the JPEG encoding to get the encoded version as small as possible before the jpeg jaggies start to show up.
I usually create a folder for a series of images in a post and convince myself I have a set of images that are named in numbered order to tell my story and then open up my post and sequentially load them in.
I personally think it's worth the time to figure out how to post the URL of the complete image inside the post and add a bit of caption right to the picture. If not for me as the poster, for the reader, particularly one who might stumble across the post in a search a year from now and not know which picture is which.
Hope that helps.
Cy.
P.S. To belabor a point: the only difference between my presentation of Jack Sheeks's Stuka and Steve Holt's is that (a) he beat me to the posting and (b) I cropped my images to 'enlarge' the airplane. He's almost certainly using a better camera than I am, from the overall quality of the image. And the images were nicely sized and compressed, which is cool. But I threw away a lot more image outside the airplane than he did.
Which leads me to muse that this may be the last year I bother. Three years ago when digicams were just becoming affordable, I could go down and deliver a relatively rare look at the contest. Now that the equipment and image processing software, anyone can do as well as I did. And if someone can do the same job quicker, there's not a lot of reason to load up Len's server with multiple threads of similar content. I put mine in knowing Steve had already 'broke the story' simply to be inclusive in the work I was doing.
Which leads to one final tip: If you are doing a series of work, say documenting a project over several posts, taking care to use the same string in the Subject of your posts will enable others to find the compete presentation in a hurry.
For example, set up the search engine to find the string "VSC 2K3", the 'And' option in the Subject field only with the 'Also search archives' box checked and it can quickly pull up all the posts I made last year. Same goes with "VSC 2K4', "Documenting Southwick" or VSC 2K2".
Small thing, but it makes the search engine work more effectively for those who follow.
The Cat Whisperer