My Photos and Photo Viewer

Digital photos on my web site either come from my Olympus D300L Digital Camera, which shoots at 1024 x 768 and 512 x 384, or from film. Film gets scanned either onto Kodak Photo CD (at 3000 x 2000) or using my HP Film Scanner which again scans to 3000 x 2000. Usually film shots put on the web site will be shrunk to 1200 x 800 or smaller.

You will also find Panoramic photos on my site -- more on those later.

Image Resizer

Most images on my web site are viewed through a special gateway program which allows you to pick the size you like to see images. By default, when you click on images you see them at their full size. However, this can be rather large, so the screen with the images will offer you a link to set your default image size.

pianobar.jpg
(1024 x 768 - 110K)
Here you see a typical image. If you set your size you will see it at the chosen size, otherwise at full size. If you view it at a smaller size there are links available to view it at other sizes, or you can click on the shrunken image and see the full sized image at any time. Below the image are the specs of the raw image. If you click on the raw image size you will get the raw image, bypassing the photo resizer.

This image has a dark cyan background. The background changes to green for panoramas, and to bright cyan for images I consider to be among the more interesting in the collection.

For example, to control the download time, you can set the size to some number of kilobytes. The program will attempt to shrink images to (very approximately) that size. JPEG sizing isn't exact, so there is often some variance.

If you set screen dimensions, images will always be shrunk to fit within that size. If the image is smaller, it will be shown as is.

Note that resizing an image takes time, so, especially on very large images like panoramas, there will be a delay before the image starts appearing. Viewing the raw image will come at the speed of your web link.

Once you view an image you can click on the smaller one to see the "raw" or full sized image file, with no processing. Or you can click on links to see the image at other sizes. (Typically you might start small and then view ones you are interested in at a larger size.) You can also set a custom width by filling in the width box. Finally, you can call up the form again to change your default size.

Cookie

Your default size is kept in a web cookie. It stays around only for your web session, so the next visit you make to my site, you may need to specify your size choice again. If you have cookies turned off in your web browser, the system will not work. You will need to click on the "raw" link to the pictures I usually provide.

Panoramic Photos

I like to bulid panoramic photos by taking a series of overlapping photos (often a full 360 degree wrap-around series) and using special software such as Live Picture's PhotoVista to seamlessly overlap the shots.

These photos are astounding, unlike anything in conventional photography. You can view them with an ordinary jpeg viewer and pan around, or you can download a special "Plugin" for your browser called the Zoom Viewer. With this plugin you can pan around the panormas with your mouse, zoom in and out, and on the full 360 degree panoramas, zoom all the way around in a circle forever.

Examples of some of these panoramas, including a very huge one that breaks some software can be found at my Burning Man Panorama page.

Report any bugs in the system (other than size mis-estimates, I know about those) to bt@templetons.com.