A picture's worth a thousand words, but only if it's a good one.

Digital photography has caused a revolution in photography.  When I used to shoot with film I begrudged the money I spent for developing every bad shot.  Some say I shouldn't have, because mistakes help you learn, so they're worth it.  But with digital photography I can learn from my mistakes instantaneously, and they don't cost me a penny!

Here are some examples of nature photos I took mostly around my home, in Wilmington, Delaware and some while traveling.  (You may need to move the scroll bar down to see them).  Click here to see my complete Flickr exhibit.

Flickr, a free service, makes it easy to use your photos for blog pages, web pages (as on this page), or for sharing with friends.  When you upload photos to Flickr you are invited to assign tags to them, that is, words which describe them in some way.  All the photos above I tagged "nature".  Photographers visit the Flickr website partly to find out who has taken photos with similar tags to their own.  This way you can meet people with similar interests.  That's why Flickr is called a "social networking website".

The main way I use digital photos is to decorate web pages.  With just about every RuminOcean blog post I include a photo to evoke a feeling or introduce a theme.  Some digital cameras take huge photos suitable for making large prints.  If you want to use these photos for web pages instead, you must scale them down.  (A standard web page is about 800 pixels wide.)  You probably wouldn't want to use more than half of that width for a photo, since larger ones take too long to download. So, how to accomplish this downsizing, also called "scaling"?

You could use an expensive program, like Photoshop.  But Interfaith Tech Associates strives to educate people about free programs.  So, the one I'd advise folks to use is GimpShop.  GimpShop is based upon a popular opensource, free graphics manipulation program called GIMP.  But GimpShop is more user friendly than GIMP.  GimpShop is Gimp hacked to make its menus closely resemble those of Photoshop.  GimpShop and Photoshop are functionally so similar that you can find oodles of free Photoshop tutorials on the Web that work just fine with GimpShop.

You can download GimpShop here.  It's a cross-platform program, so whether you use Microsoft XP or Windows 95, or Mac OSX, or Linux, you'll find a version right for your computer.

Once you've got GimpShop installed, here's how to downsize, i.e. rescale, a digital photograph:

1.  Start GimpShop.

2.  Open your digital photo by clicking "Open" under the "file" menu and then navigate to where that photo is on your computer.

3.  When you have located the photo in your navigation browser, click "open".

4.  You should now see the photo presented in the GimpShop window.

Under the "Image" menu, click on "image size".

5.  I would suggest using the pixel unit of measurement.  Select pixels in the pull-down menu box.  Then set the width of the photo between 250 and 400.  400 will make the photo take up about half a browser window.  Just to the right of the Width and Height windows you will see a tiny icon that looks like two links of chain.  When those two links touch each other and you set either height or width, the other measurement will automatically set itself at the appropriate number in order to maintain the same proportion of width and heighth of the original photo.  But if you click on the double link chain icon so that the two links separate, then the height and width of the photo get unlinked; which means that if you set height or width alone the other measurement will not automatically be set to maintain proportionality.  This is not so important in photos that contain mostly, say, patches of color.  But, to keep any semblance of the original image of, say,  a person or building, you will need to have those two links touching in the chain icon.

6.  Next, set the quality (interpolation) at whatever value you wish.  Linear is the standard setting.

7.  Finally, click on the "scale" button and save the rescaled photo to whatever location on your computer you wish.

You are now ready to embed your downsized photo in a web page.  A good, free program for that purpose is NVU.