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Classroom Assignment 2 Example - Photo Shoot and Resample

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Education & Training with Tech Training for You!

 Craig's Classroom - Virtual Course Graphics for Bloggers 101 is underway. (course information page, pre-recorded videos, watch at your own pace.) We have a nice group signed up! :) I am creating a series of classroom assignments for the students to complete the course. This post is to illustrate a report on Assignment #2

Photography assignment - Go out and take THREE photos with your normal camera setting.

Photo 1take a photo of a sign, have the edges fill as much of the frame as you can
Photo 2Street scene of a neighborhood in your area 
Photo 3 - a close up shot of something organic (bed of flowers, leaves of tree, shrub close up, this is more fun in the spring than the summer!)

Upload the photos onto your hard drive. Determine two things about each photo:
a) the number of pixels (width x height)
b) the file size of the photo

Next, resample the photos down to be "blog-sized" (in this case no more than 400 pixels on the longest edge of the photo)

In your report blog post, indicate the original pixel size of each of the photos and file size of the original, then the file size of the resampled blog sized version.

The following post is an example of what the students need to create
(I'm including this post in my own regular blog feed as well as you all might learn a point or two from our class discussion! and enrollment is open if you want to know even more!)

Assignment #2 - Photo Shoot and Resample
The following are three photos that I took on a recent morning on my commute to work.

Photo #1 - Sign in the Subway Station
The original photo was shot using my android phone. The size of the photo in pixels was 1944 wide by 2592 high and the file size was 1.1MB. The resampled photo below is 300 pixels wide and 400 pixels high and is 39KB

subway sign

Photo #2 - Street Scene -
Looking up Park Avenue toward Grand Central Station
This photo was originally another 5 megapixel shot 
1944 wide by 2592 high and the file size was 1.6MB. The resampled photo below is 300 pixels wide and 400 pixels high and is 58KB

park avenue

Photo #3 - Closeup of something Organic - 
Shrub in the Park
This photo was originally another 5 megapixel shot 
1944 wide by 2592 high and the file size was 2.1MB. The resampled photo below is 300 pixels wide and 400 pixels high and is 93KB

shrub

Conclusions - 
The sign had large area of a solid color and thus was the smallest file size. The street scene was more complex and was the next larger size file. The shrub had many complex edges caused by leaves and had the largest file size.

If the unsampled photos would have been inserted into the blog post the total size of the graphics would have been 4.8MB. In their resampled forms, they only added up to 190KB (or in other words about 4% of the size of the originals). That's a significant difference in your blog page load times!

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Craig Daniels
This blog is all about technology and helping you to use it smarter! Your digital footprint is your chance to attract new clients. What kind of impression are you making via your website, blog, and social media? We’ll be talking about that! Are you as productive as you can be? What apps might help you out? Do you know how to use all the best tools inside the apps? I enjoy photography and videography, you can expect to see those topics also on this blog.
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PS - get ready for some homework… :) 

Comments(9)

Winston Heverly
Coldwell Banker Access Realty - South Macon, GA
GRI, ABR, SFR, CDPE, CIAS, PA

Is there anyway to determine how fast or slow the downloading process takes? I always try to size the photos I take according to the blog sort of speak.

Feb 18, 2012 04:45 AM
Craig Daniels
Tech Training for You! - Staten Island, NY
Technology Instructor/Project Consultant

Winston - most people have high-speed internet these days so it is much less obvious than it used to be with 56K modems! If you resample your graphics like you see above down to "actual insert" size, most graphics will fall easily under 100K each. Depending on how many photos you use and how complex your background, banner, etc are will also slow down your page load. Most pages should load in a few seconds. If you upload original size JPGs though, there is a NOTICABLE slow down. I do see it quite often, you can tell when you are on a page where the graphics were not sampled down. thanks for checking in :)

Feb 18, 2012 04:54 AM
Surprise Arizona Realtor Jim Braun Sun City Grand Active Adult Communities
Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage Jim Braun Sun City Grand Az - Surprise, AZ
Surprise AZ real estate Phoenix West Valley

Craig: Thank you for the information. I always size down considerably for my blog.

Feb 18, 2012 05:52 AM
Kristine Ginsberg
Elite Staging and Redesign, LLC - Short Hills, NJ
NJ Home Stager

Craig - I'm all signed up and ready to take your course. I always use way too large photos, something I obviously need to change. Looking forward to jumping in and learning all I can. Have a great weekend!

Feb 18, 2012 06:15 AM
Roberta Kayne
Dublin & Central Ohio Homes - Dublin, OH
CRS, ABR, SFR, RRS, Realtor, Re/Max Affiliates

Great info Craig!  I usually downsize my photos from 12MB to about 1MB, so you are saying I need to get them down even smaller when I post.  Hmmm.  Easy to do, but will the quality still look good?

Feb 18, 2012 07:44 AM
Joanna Cohlan
Fresh Eyes For Your Home - Chappaqua, NY
Designing, Decorating & Staging Westchester Homes

Hi Craig, just got this assignment and I am going to NEWARK tomorrow to the Newark Museum and will take photos of signs!!!

Feb 18, 2012 09:50 AM
Craig Daniels
Tech Training for You! - Staten Island, NY
Technology Instructor/Project Consultant

Jim - glad to hear that you've that figured out, makes a difference!

Kristine - that's terrific that you finally got to sign up, very glad you are there! :)

Roberta - you are heading in the right direction - watch out for the module 2 video where I talk quite a bit about that. You want to be under 1MB also. Your target will be not the file size but the number of pixels you display at. The quality will be just as good as the 1MB size but you won't have the extra burden of heavy files! see you in class! :)

Joanna - I look forward to you turning in your assignment, have fun at the musuem :)

Feb 18, 2012 10:33 AM
Tom Arstingstall, General Contractor, Dry Rot, Water Damage Sacramento, El Dorado County - (916) 765-5366
Dry Rot and Water Damage www.tromlerconstruction.com Mobile - 916-765-5366 - Placerville, CA
General Contractor, Dry Rot and Water Damage

I always reduce the size and "save of web", I get the results that you talk about Craig. Is there any truth that Google is looking for quick page load times?

Feb 18, 2012 01:17 PM
Craig Daniels
Tech Training for You! - Staten Island, NY
Technology Instructor/Project Consultant

Tom - google measures page load times as one of the many things that it helps to rank pages. It is a minor piece in the scheme of things, but every little bit helps!

Feb 18, 2012 08:40 PM