Photos of Bay City Michigan

Whoooo! Niice chemtrails you got there!

Move along, nothing to see here

Hi Bastish... been really enjoying your photos of your travels in the States. You seem to revel in the colors and structure of the world and it is fascinating to follow your eyes.

I wanted to ask, since I'm really new to using a digital camera, what size do you save your files in? And do you save them in RAW, tiff, or jpeg? (I'm using a Nikon Coolpix 5400 and they still haven't incorporated RAW into the firmware). Also do you carry around lots of memory cards? Trying to figure out what I need to get out there and not find myself running out of memory or power. So different from film photography and I'm still not comfortable with using a digital camera.

I use the Panasonic Lumix, and I usually have two 256 Megabyte cards on me, but very rarely need to use the second, since I move the photos from the disk to my computer every night. When I went on vacation for two weeks without the laptop, I had a total of about 650 megabytes in memory cards with me, and it worked out fine, but I was a little more selective with my shots.

I always have two batteries with me, but the Lumix is very nice to long battery life, especially since I can change all the settings in the eye-viewer rather than the screen, which would kill my power real quick.

If you have an iPod, I think I heard that you can now download images to the iPod from the memory chip, which would mean you can basically cary your hard drive with you wherever you go, and you will only need on memory stick.

The Lumix doesn't take RAW photos. Just simple jpegs at medium size (I forget the pixels, but just over a-4 I think.) My camera takes up to 2 megapixels, and I always have it set there.

Once I get them onto my computer, I open them all in photoshop, and reduce the dimensons to 850px width, and reduce the quality for the web.

I then upload them to my Gallery software, which resizes them to 500px wide for display, (also leaving the 800px on the server. If you want to see it, click on the 500px)

For the front page, I have to resize it one more time in Photoshop to 450px wide, to fit my layout.

That's all I do. If it doesn't answet you question , let me know and I'll take time to make a big writeup for an "about" page to my site...

Kevin, I wanted to thank you for taking the time to reply to my question about using digital cameras. It was a great help and gave me an idea about how to get started. Your site and photos are probably the singlemost inspiring resource in getting me to really go for trying to really learn to use my digital camera. In your latest set of pictures, I keep going back to the one of the carps. It's like magic...