How to photograph and submit a picture

What you need:

A camera, a Corvette, a scanner, and image editing software.

Here is what I did, it's really pretty simple:

  1. Wash and wax the baby.
  2. Park in front of a nice background.
  3. Use 35mm film, appropriate for the conditions. 100 or 200 speed is usually recommended for outdoor/sunny pictures. Lower numbers mean higher resolution film, which require brighter surroundings.
  4. Take lots of pictures. Develop to 5x7 or larger size.
  5. Use a color scanner. 24 bit color is good.
  6. Do any editing/cropping on the computer.
  7. Send the image to me so I can add it to the list. (see below)

Some notes: Some think the best place to shoot from is 30 degrees or so from the front of the car, and from a little above eye-level. Depending on your height, stand on a bucket or something. Turn the front wheels so you can see the tread. Put the top down. Anything will work, from a plain old Nikon 35mm "sure shot" type camera on up. Shooting in the morning or evening gives you "better" light and shadows, but be sure the sun is at your back.

The secret is to take lots of pictures. Plan to use an entire roll for the car. Play with angles and such. If you have expensive wheels, turn the fromt wheels so you can see them.

When scanning, the resolution to use depends on the size you want the final image to be. Most monitors are 70-100 dpi, so scanning at 80 dpi will result in an image that is approximately the same size as your photo. Most image editing software does not resize well, so if you want several different size images, you may want to scan at several resolutions. If you want an image to be a particular size on your monitor, the following equation can be used: 

scanning_dpi=screen_dpi*(monitor_width/picture_width)
Where:
screen_dpi is the resolution (dots/inch) of your monitor
monitor_width is the desired width (in inches) of the image on your monitor
picture_width is the actual width (in inches) of the picture

You can determine the resolution of your monitor by dividing the horizontal number of pixels by the horizontal viewing dimension. For me, 1280 dots/12 inches=106 dpi.

If you have image editing software, you can make a picture that is the same size as your monitor (i.e. 1024x768, 800x600, 1280x1024) and another that is maybe 100 to 150 pixels wide for a thumbnail view. To save space, try converting the picture to 256 colors, saving as a lower quality (higher compression) .jpg file. I have seen large pictures look quite good as "low quality" files that only take up 60K.

Please use JPEG if possible since they are about half the size of the same GIF file. BMP files are HUGE, and not everyone can see them, so please do not use that format. For us DOS users, please stick to the 8.3 file naming convention. The first 2 characters should be the year, ie 89conv.jpg. That is so the directory will be sorted by year should anyone log in via FTP. If you use MS Windows, a good free graphics program is Lview Pro 1.6.

Getting the image to me

The current vettenet site does not allow anonymous ftp. There are several other choices to use for getting the image to me. The best is to uuencode it and email it. Other hex/ascii conversions may work (such as binhex), but for best results use uuencode. If you can't email files for some reason, then anonymous ftp to a site that does allow anonymous uploads would work. If you don't know of any, contact me. The last option is to snail mail me a disk with the image on it. I can read both PC and Mac format disks.

Does anyone have any good MPEG videos of their car?......

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