REAL COMPUTER STUFF!

No allegories, no symbolism, no literature, no poetry (well, we'll see)...

This here is a computer column. Just the facts. A how-to. Yes friends, by special request from a reader in Australia who's been admiring my photos, I hereby reveal all .

What my correspondent wanted to know was how I take all these pictures and prepare them for posting on the Web. Those of you just starting out with this technology will be pleased to see how easy it is, while you slumming graphics pros will be apalled to see how little I really know and understand. Fortunately or not, I have found that being ignorant and lazy is not necessarily an impediment!

You need to know what we're working with here. We can start with this actual unrehearsed Saturday morning shot of my work area. Moving from left to right, we see the Que USB CD-burner in its fabuloso faux leather case, a battery charger for the Nikon CoolPix 950's nickel metal hydride AA cells, ye olde 17" Sony monitor, the AirPort base station, a USB Compact Flash card reader, a USB Zip 100 drive with a powered USB hub on top, the Epson 870 printer, and a tangerine iBook. The Power Macintosh 8600 sits on the floor, and that's a MIDI keyboard balanced on top. The Big Guy, as I call him, is connected to the AirPort base station via an Ethernet crossover cable. The iBook shares the printer with the Big Guy on my own little wireless network and requires no physcial connection to run a print job. There's an ancient scanner sitting on a wooden box underneath the left end of the table. My Internet connection is the only kind available and delivers a reliable 26-38kbps with never a blip. That's still awfully slow, but considering the location (see bottom of article!), I should probably be glad the phone lines are as good as they are.

This is where it all happens!

The computer itself is just over three years old. Originally equipped with a 200MHz 604e processor, it now sports a 450MHz G3 upgrade and 224 MB of RAM. The original 2GB hard drive gets to loaf because of the 7200rpm 4.5GB drive that runs the whole shebang on OS 8.6. The VRAM is maxed out, and a USB card lets me use all the cool USB gear available these days and cover the iBook at the same time. Seems funny, kinda: I have this "old" PCI PowerMac running all-USB peripherals and there are still two empty PCI slots. I could still add FireWire, a graphics card, or anything else. New gear is cool, but this 8600 is still tops for reliability and upgradeability, and it has all those AV ports (RCA phono plugs, video in/out, etc.)! The G3 processor upgrade (from XLR8) has been working flawlessly since I installed it 8 months ago.

My Nikon CoolPix 950 is the kind of tool that I really can't afford and yet can't afford not to have. It was a steal at just a hair over $500 US back when MobShop.com was called something else and before they caught on to the scam being run by eBay sharpies who were buying up all the loot for resale. The Nikon is an amazing camera with the ability to take closeups at a distance of 2 cm and adapt to all kinds of light conditions even on automatic settings (the above shot, for example, is not a flash picture). And this brings us to...

POINT #1: You need to have the right tools. It's far easier to take good pictures with a good camera. The color balance, focus, and other elements will already be where you want them to be, for example. This thing takes shots in natural light, under incandescents, at night, whatever. After reading the manual backwards and forwards to learn all the tricks, I now almost always use the camera on full automatic. You may well be able to achieve very pleasing results with a less expensive camera, in other words. It all depends.

View from "dining room"

The CoolPix 950 has an excellent lens and zooms from wide-angle to a modest 3X (optical) and is a joy to use in composing shots. The NiMH batteries seem to last a relatively long time, but what do I know? The 32MB Compact Flash card holds maybe 65+ images at the normal size and quality setting, which saves them as 1,600 x 1,200 pixel whoppers. Yes, that's much larger than anyone needs for Web publishing, but I am an arteest and must have my pixels!

Transferring the images to the computer couldn't be simpler. I just remove the 32MB card from the Nikon's underbelly, insert it in the cute little USB card reader, and zap! Another 30MB or so of JPEGs plops onto the 8600's hard drive (cull now!). Managing all these image files is my current preoccupation, as you might well imagine -- that's what the CD burner is for -- but the immediate question is, which application is best for looking at what you've got?

The NikonView software that comes with the camera has the advantage of presenting you with thumbnails if you choose to view the images that way. It also doesn't have a "Rotate" command that I've been able to find, so at first I dragged the NikonView document icons onto PictureViewer to open them up, rotate if necessary, resize, and export them to the desktop for emailing to folks. When I started using the USB Compact Flash reader instead of the serial cable to get the images into my computer, I didn't need to mount the camera using the NikonView app. What's more, the pictures arrived as QuickTime JPEGs in the first place. Well, all right then! My brother the Webmaster in Austin, Texas has the same camera and has told me repeatedly which astonishly useful shareware app I need to manage all this, but I have characteristically put this chore off for so long that I have forgotten the particulars. More evidence, if any is required, for the "anyone can do this" hypothesis. In any event, let's say I now have a big fat JPEG on the desktop. What do I use to get it onto a Web page? wwwART 2.0, that's what.

Can't get enough of mountains & clouds

POINT #2: "I don' got to show you no steenking Photoshop!" I have that, certainly (5.0), but for this kind of thing, MicroFrontier's wwwART 2.0 is pretty slick, and it only costs $19.95! Yes, I've mentioned this one before. You can prepare JPEGs or GIFs for Web use much more quickly with this than with Photoshop, especially if you're not a Photoshop whiz. It all has to do with fewer numbers of steps and also that I learned wwwART before I got Photoshop. Why mess with success?

Here's the procedure: I open the 1,600 x 1,200 QuickTime JPEG, select Half Size from the Image menu, and hit command-C to copy it. I open up wwwART 2.0 to an 800 x 600 pixel RGB document, hit command-V, and now I have a selected 800 x 600 pixel image sitting on a blank window of the same size. I select Scale from wwwART's own Image menu, enter a pixel width dimension (in the case of these images here, 355 pixels), and poof! A resized image, still selected, floats in the 800 x 600 window. The only changes I make to the image occur at this point and usually consist of an automatic contrast adjustment and sometimes a drop shadow. (This last item is drop-dead simple. If you've already set your parameters, a drop shadow is only a two-click affair.) Lately though, I've been bored with done-to-death drop shadows, which is why I'm experimenting with the sunken frames you see on this page. A normally-proportioned image 355 pixels wide fits nicely in the center of the 380 pixel wide "windowframe," resulting in the images you see here. I have wwwART set to save JPEGs at "High" quality, but I can't tell you how much of a difference that makes in image quality. It does make for larger files, though.

My brother the webmaster took one look at a similar trick I was trying at Zoozone News and used FireWorks and Dreamweaver to whip up a cool little HTML-generated thingie that looks just as good, but I don't understand that one yet. For now pasting onto slightly larger "frame" images works fine.

New Mexico clothes dryer

Notice I haven't said anything about optimizing for Web use, because I really don't bother. Churning this stuff out at the rate I do leaves little time for that kind of tweaking, although lighter-weight images would make for shorter download times. Not even thinking about this is a horrible sin on my part and I have no excuse other than laziness and arrogance: "Who cares how big it is, it's good enough to wait for!" Those of you who actually know how to do this stuff are tearing your hair out by now, but that just leads us to:

POINT #3: If you have a modicum of talent and can take decent pictures with a good digital camera, you don't need to know "how to do this stuff"! Simple software on a reasonably fast Mac will do the trick.

No doubt more powerful software is better for this kind of work, but for now, that's it (I'll learn the other stuff someday). You have it all, except for my final confession: these pages are assembled using Claris HomePage! (My webmaster brother groans and hides his face, designers and graphics pros run screaming from the room, and half the rest of you are shaking your heads, but...it....works!) My Australian reader will probably be disappointed: "What, that's all? He takes photos with a Nikon, doesn't use the Nikon software, doesn't use Photoshop, and never optimizes?" Yep! In short, these photos are no more than the happy result of putting together New Mexico, Nikon, Apple, and me.

Everything else is just geekwax!

Home for now, sweet home

John H. Farr edits the news for Applelinks.com and invites your comments. The Farr Site Archives will take you to the past two years' worth of columns. John also writes his WebFaust column for MacAddict.com and a monthly op-ed page column called "El Emigrante" for Horse Fly in Taos, NM. He's also got some JPEG-laden weirdness going on at a special project, Zoozone News.

Official FARR SITE Tidbit: the byline graphic is produced with Photoshop, then,uh, tweaked (!) in wwwART 2.0. . .

To be notified whenever the column is updated, just send a message titled "Subscribe FSN" to this address.