box elder: Frosty morning 5 - and then the sun came up...

Saturday, January 29, 2011

Frosty morning 5 - and then the sun came up...

... and in next to no time it had turned the ice to crystalline droplets, and then it was gone.

11 comments:

Catalyst said...: Love that last photo, Lucy.; 9:27 pm
Jean said...: I think I like these best. So tactile, so atmospheric. And the last one: less naturalistic, but so aesthetically satisfying.; 9:28 pm
Rouchswalwe said...: My whiskers are quivering ... for a moment I thought this must be what it is like for a cat padding through the morning. The light! And the quickness you must have to capture it all before it dissipates. Oh, Lucy you lavish us! Merci bien!; 2:41 pm
20th Century Woman said...: Such wonderful frosty posts. What pictures!; 7:18 pm
Unknown said...: Am I right in thinking that photographs taken contre jour like these is easier with digital cameras than with film? Or is it that the new technology in the cameras allows such felicitous freedom? The frost on the grass has expectional mystery and delicacy. Picks you up to contemplate them.; 5:48 pm
Roderick Robinson said...: I've been neglecting Box Elder because you're into flowery stuff and I'm only going to make a fool of myself when contemplating a hellebore. Although I love the implicit metamorphosis between winter and spring. I note you are getting away with murder on the technical front: the first pic in Frosty Morning 5, and no doubt many others, is a remarkable 1.3 MB and took some time to unscroll for me. Once upon a time we were all supposed to shrink the contents of pix intended for the Internet and I have software which gets them down to an almost negligible 32 kB. But big files mean better detail as we can see from your ethereal dew drops and I think I can safely stop worrying about Blogger's ability to handle big file pix.; 12:28 pm
Lucy said...: Thanks chaps. I really will get back to posting something else soon...

BB - what you say about the size of the images puzzles me; I export them on Picasa at roughly 8oo x 600, then upload them to a Picasa album at that size, from which I then ship them to the blog. (I do this because bloody blogger's new post editor will no longer accept uploads directly from my main computer, all I get is 'server error' when I try; god knows why not, it will from the mini laptop but I can't really carry too many files on there).

That is the formula resolution that Picasa will export in, and the minimum I can get away with using the extra width, margins cut to the bone, extra-large format for gross photographic egos, which I mostly use here (and not available on the old post editor, so I can't revert to that). The images are rarely more than 400 KB at that resolution, so I don't understand why you say it's coming up at over 1MB at all, I make it 386KB - at full size prior to reduction it's about 5MB.

If I used them at full-size I'd very quickly have used up my Blogger/Picasas allowance and have to start a new blog like Tristan did because he never shrunk his pics. I'm already up to 57%.; 7:23 pm
Roderick Robinson said...: I hope I haven't set a hare that's charging off into confusion. As always I was impressed by the quality of your pix and I idly right-clicked on the top one in Frosty Morning 5 then went to Properties: whether 1.3 MB referred to that pic alone, or all of them associated with that particular post, I cannot say.

What am I saying? Get with it BB! I have now clicked on the second one down and that is 0.9 MB so the values appear to relate to individual pix.

Being far more anal than you (if you can be regarded as anal at all) and because I use Photoshop rather than Picasa I have devised a slightly different system which may be the same as yours but with different names. All pix used in the blog, whether from my camera or Google Images, are first loaded into a BlogPix folder in Windows My Pictures. There I crop them for purely aesthetic (I use the adjective loosely) reasons and, until quite recently I then used PS's image size feature to reduce them to one of two widths: 600 pixels (pix centred on the column and occupying about three-quarters column width) and 200 pixels (Pix indented into the text column on the left).

For two years or so quality suffered but then I never had any pretensions as a photographer. More recently I have caused Blogger to digest centred pix of much greater width (and hence much larger file values). I had completely forgotten about the eventual capacity limits with Blogger and I shall be reverting to my previous anality.

I was going to recommend you changed to the previous Blogger pic posting system (A simple mouse click in Settings) because it is far simpler and less restricted. But I see you're disinclined because of a feature the new system offers. I shudder to think of you existing under a dark cloud labelled 57% and thereby being discouraged from posting as often as you do. There are of course blog systems which charge a fee and which, I suspect, have greater capacity than Blogger. I would be perfectly prepared to initiate a fund called PBEAANT (Perpetuate Box Elder As A National Treasure) if things get stickier.; 12:00 pm
Lucy said...: Dear BB, national treasure yourself!

I used to do it in PS, with 'reduce image size' but then I upgraded my PS and it got more complicated, so for a while I used to e-mail pics to myself using Windows 'make my images smaller' function which really made them a bit too small, then darling Julia (PP) over a coffee in Lamballe recommended Picasa's export function, which is so quick and handy I've never looked back.

I think I used an inordinate amount of my allowance over a short period when I was got lazy and not reducing at all, by shrinking them as I do now I seem to be using up relatively little allowance. It's not difficult just to set up a new account anyway, and since I've been going over four years and only got just over half-way through I reckon I'm probably set for as long again, by which time blogging of this kind will probably be considered as quaint and recondite as train spotting, CB radio and the collecting of tea cards.; 5:59 pm
Roderick Robinson said...: This exchange is unlikely to enhance your reputation as the ne plus ultra of bloggers so I'll keep things short. Pix travelling from one type of software to another gather extra data (I think) to ensure compatability. Thus it may not be possible to beat this tendency if you wish to retain pic quality.; 10:31 am
HKatz said...: I've been looking through the frosty photos from this post and earlier ones - they're enchanting (and some of those close ups look like creatures from fantasy stories). It's great seeing the world through your lens.; 1:03 pm