TIMP

flickr playing up - will repost in a new post.

birdstrike

Most excellent photos posted yesterday. The competition is going to be tight ^

Suggestion for the contributors -> The contest rules say

This rule is designed to make the entire picture visible on an average sized screen without scrolling and to be kind to our members on lower bandwidth connections.

However! Making the image much smaller than that upper limit also causes the detail to be harder to see and reduces the impact of your picture.

I encourage those who have submitted 400x and 500x sized shots to relink to images closer to, but not exceeding, the 800x maximum allowed by the rules.

Cheers,

Rick

hauteboy

Re: Melilla

Actually it's more like 2 miles. Melilla is a Spanish enclave on the African continent surrounded by Morocco. Ceuta is the other Spanish enclave on the Moroccan side across from Gibraltar.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melilla

allset2travel

I tried hard to conform to size rule and do justice to the image. My 2 entries are slightly over, would you suggest I re-size further? Thanks

birdstrike

Just got back to my computer after a day in SF.

allset2travel, your images meet the 800 pixel max dimension requirement.

The folks I was addressing above were those who have posted the small 500x300 pixel images and, to a lesser extent, those who have posted 800x images that are only 85KB in size.

I did go back and look at your pictures. They are oversized in terms of KB by almost 3x. So, in the interests of bandwidth, and to keep the playing field level in terms of JPEG compression artifacts, I would appreciate it if you would recompress your original images to also meet the 200KB requirement.

and you folks with the small pictures - they are really good and need to be upsized ( if the originals allow) to do them justice.

lili

Thank you, Birdstrike, for setting up this thread. Technically nice also to use the capabilities of the FT Trip Reports forum. ^ ^

The photos have really livened up FT, and I'm enjoying the fantastic contributions. I wish there were a way to comment/ask questions about the photos and read others responses without cluttering the thread.

The fewer rules the better, and I think you have decided wisely. Not that I'm feeling competitive, and I appreciate your advice to help us upload better photos, but are we aiming for technical expertise or emotion and story telling? Not that they are mutually exclusive.

I'm "defending" my selection of a "you had to have been there" night shot from my first trip to Venice with a $49 Intel digital camera from the swap meet. I may have a larger version somewhere, but it ain't got more detail! and there is no way to correct for camera movement, yet it is my favorite shot of all my Venice photos. For me it's totally evocative of the unexpected you always find in Venice and I wanted to share. So I did. Thanks for the opportunity.

Great job, and a great idea!

TIMP

birdstrike

Lili,

Thank you for the kind words. If it wasn't for the embedded photo capability of Trip Reports, I don't know if I would have attempted it.

I have two thoughts on this. First thought: I appreciate the thread having remained mostly photographs since it is the images that are being showcased. It will also make voting easier (by post number), though I'm now leaning towards collecting all the images into a hosted site where people can simply see and vote on images X, Y, and Z without having to scroll through 9 or 10 pages of FlyerTalk thread.

(If anyone objects to this concept of using a hosted site for voting, please PM me).

Second thought: For voting there will be a separate thread to solicit votes. In that thread I would like to invite the voters to describe what they liked about their choices and to ask questions there if so desired.

The primary voting criteria will be how closely the image matches the theme of the contest "Urban Streetscapes". I deliberately chose a topic open to wide interpretation for this first contest to encourage participation. How and why FlyerTalkers will choose one image over another will be left to their individual judgment.

It is my goal to level the playing field as much as possible precisely to allow the $49 camera the same opportunity to win as a $10K wide-format digital-backed technical wonder.

I, too, find your photograph extremely evocative. I'm delighted that you chose to share it. ms. birdstrike happened to wander in just now and said "ohhh!" when she saw it. @:-)

To me, the camera movement and grain add to the story your image tells.

TIMP

I must admit I really enjoyed going through my photos and trying to find ones I thought fitted the theme. I definately want more of these!

PTravel

Lili, please see my sig.

BuddyBird

1st entry, August 2006

BuddyBird

2nd entry, July 2005

Bundy Bear

London November 2006, taken from the top of St Pauls Cathedral. And it was sunny.

Ok 2 shots from this series from me done, competition is going to be tough.

Love the Tokyo Shinjuku photos was only there a few months ago.

allset2travel

My photos now are too small. When trying to down-size within photobucket.som, I shrink image from 800x600 (original post on FT) to 2 steps down.Now they are only 160x115. I would like to bump them back up to 800x600. But at 800x600, the total bytes would exceed your rule.Help!

birdstrike

Very strange. I tried to resample them in Picassa, but that didn't work. I fired up Photoshop and that did the trick:

http://www.batnet.com/bogart/allset1_71.jpg
http://www.batnet.com/bogart/allset2_80.jpg

You can either pull these down and rehost on Photobucket, or link to them directly from my site.

Thanks for making the change!

Regards,

Rick