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Sample Images

Original vs. Web | How We Pick 1 | How We Pick 2 | Focus
Beauty in Details | High Resolution Samples

The Original vs. Web Images

The original image directly from our camera is an 8 megapixel image (3500 x 2350 pixels). The image that we put online is 450 x 300 pixels. Why do we put such a small picture on the web? Two reasons: 1) the image needs to fit on a typical web browser that might only be 800 pixels wide or so, and 2) the file size has to be small so that we can post thousands of photos on our site and not run out of space (each image is about 20-40kB in size, while the originals are 1-3Mb, over 100 times as large!). We achieve smaller file sizes by reducing the image size in pixels, and also reducing the quality of the image (i.e. by making it slightly more fuzzy around edges, see our sample below).

Image Size

Here is a comparison of how big the original image is, and how small the image is that we post on the web. It is only about 1/60th the size of the original!!

original vs. web

Another way to look at this is to compare the image size to how big your monitor is. A typical monitor is about 1024 x 768 pixels. That means that if you were to look at one of our images at its 100% size, where one pixel in the picture is one pixel on your monitor, the photo would fill about 9 monitors! Imagine having 9 monitors stacked up like this...that is how big the photo is when viewed at a 1:1 pixel to pixel ratio!

original vs. monitor

Image Quality

Another critical process we do to all of our website images is to reduce the quality so that the file size gets reduced. Even when images are 450x300 pixels, they are still about 100kB in size. This is too big when you are posting 1000's of photos. So, we reduce the quality, while balancing the clrarity and appeal of the photos.

What does this reduction in quality do? Well, if you look closely, you might notice "fuzzy", or "jagged" edges on some photos, especially around areas of high contrast and high focus. This is an artefact of .jpeg files when they are reduced in quality. It does not mean the original is poor. Take a look at this sample to see what we are talking about. Notice the fuzzy edges around the shoulder and helmet. See how they aren't there in the higher quality version of the photo!

(Note that the zoom-in crops are 250% of the actual image size. This means that each pixel in the original is about 2 pixels on your monitor. This makes even the high quality image look a bit "blocky". We did this so you can see the wavy lines we are talking about...this is an extremely tight close-up, about 0.5% of the total image size!!)

Close Up of Image Quality