Images From Ethiopia: About These Photos

I tried my best to contact the people featured in these pages to ask permission, but if you see yourself here and want something changed or removed (or added), just write.

Most of these photos were taken by me on a Canon PowerShot A10 digital camera, wielded in what is technically known as the “point-and-click” fashion.  Some were taken by other people, especially Seb, and some were taken on his Fuji FinePix.  A handful were taken by Chris on his old-school film camera.

I don’t know much about photography, but any idiot can have an opinion:

A sample image before and after editing in Photoshop using gradients and layers.

I resized most photos in Photoshop, sometimes with further editing.  I wanted very badly to use a command-line tool like ImageMagick, but in the end my eye usually preferred Photoshop’s “Nearest Neighbor” resampling algorithm to any of ImageMagick’s 15 algorithms.  (See examples below.)  After my Photoshop trial expired I used a mix of ImageMagick and the GIMP.

The A10 is a 1.3-megapixel camera: max resolution 1280x960.  But when you’re shooting for the Web any detail beyond that will be lost anyway during resizing.  More important than megapixels is the resampling algorithm used by your image-processing software, and the color, lighting, and (especially) focus of the shot.

I wish point-and-click camera reviews gave more attention to autofocus.  The #1 killer of my most promising shots, after incompetence, was poor focus and it is fatal.  What sharpening effects like “unsharp mask” produce is grotesque compared to an originally well focused shot.

Something useful I learned while processing these images:  The JPEG format can store a lot of junk in the file, typically 15-40 KB per image.  To keep your files small for fast download, strip the junk.  Here’s one way (Unix), demonstrated on a tiny thumbnail image saved from Photoshop:

$ ls -l *.jpg
-rwx------  1 Jacob Eliosoff None 25728 Jul 12 06:33 old.jpg
$ jpegtran -optimize -copy none old.jpg > new.jpg
$ ls -l *.jpg
-rw-r--r--  1 Jacob Eliosoff None   643 Jul 12 06:33 new.jpg
-rwx------  1 Jacob Eliosoff None 25728 Jul 12 06:33 old.jpg

Note that the file size shrank from 26 KB to 0.6 KB.  Image quality is identical, though info like date picture taken, camera model etc is lost.  To find out what makes up the rest of the trimmed 25 KB you’ll have to ask an expert.

I wrote the HTML by hand which may have something to do with why I’ve updated it three times in two years.

Four different resampling algorithms applied to the same photo: ImageMagick’s “Cubic” and “Lanczos”, and Photoshop’s “Bicubic Sharper” and “Nearest Neighbor”.  I far prefer the last.

The same four algorithms applied to another photo.  For this type of shot Lanczos or Bicubic Sharper come out best.

The ads are here mostly as an experiment.  In the unlikely event that they make enough money for Google to send me a cheque, 80% will go to Ethiopian recipients of my choosing and 20% to my pals at Openface for graciously hosting this site.

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