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Okay, what Colorado photo thread would be complete without a couple or more pics of the Denver Broncos. Granted these are OLD but they were taken on my old camara (can't find the train trip photos to Glenwood but found these) but they were taken on my birthday 08-19-2000 (uploaded the next day):
Yep, that's Thunder and his/her rider after a touchdown! Go Broncos!
Hard to take photos in a stadium when you are short you rarely can't get them without people's heads in the way. You can see the new Mile High in the background being built. BTW, there's no corporate name when I type Mile High Stadium - it's just wrong. The tax payers in the metro area paid for that place, not some corporate machine that will probably...never mind, on to the photo:
One last photo(s?) for the night. I finally found the photos I took from the trainride to and in Glenwood Springs but most of those worthy of posting were with family members. Pics from Union Station in Denver, the rail cars and of course the elegent and historic Welcome to the historic Hotel Colorado in Glenwood Springs, CO which BTW, used to be a sanitorium and once housed Doc Holliday and a various interesting others including presidents and such after it was converted...look at their history page. They have so many cool photos and if you are a person that doesn't sleep well in new surroundings, Glenwood has a lot of offerings close by for food, early morning coffee and who doesn't love a good and greasy Denny's breakfast? Honestly, I do. Oh and before I moved to Grand Junction, I used to stay in Glenwood (at a different hotel) a lot and it's such a great place to stay anytime of year.
Altered photo of the outdoor bar the Hotel Colorado has and keep in mind this was mid September and it can be very HOT, oddly enough up there:
And the final for the night, a photo of the hazards of living in Colorado which we have been well reminded of the last day or so, wild fire as seen from the train. I believe this was before the Moffet Tunnel which was an engineering feat for the time and a long, long tunnel at that:
On some of those pics, I don't understand how you could get that clarity without having a lot of Pixels and some way of getting a better focus and/or long exposure times.
Once in a while I find myself having the perfect time and place to take a pic. But it rarely captures the scene like I see it with my own eyes. Do you know what I mean?
It's difficult to capture exactly what your eye sees. Things causing this issue is the lens, the camera reproducing correct colors, dynamic range, image size and of all things, your mind and some other factors as well.
Depending on the lens, it can distort what you're seeing by being so wide angle, it bends things, or by being too short to capture enough of the scene.
Different cameras will produce different colors, some greener, some bluer, some redder. Fuji cameras tend to produce excellent landscape colors and great skin tones. Nikons tend to produce good reds and blues while Canon's lean more towards a flat color (although new cameras over the last 4-5 months have been producing better colors now from Canon). None of them will probably produce what you actually saw.
Dynamic range - in short/dumbed down, how many different levels can your camera capture without turning them black in the dark areas or white in the light areas. For instance, you have a great bright blue sky with some nice puffy clouds and some really nice landscape features (trees, rocks, flower field, etc.). You take that picture with the sky and the landscape and the landscape part of it turns out really nice, but the blue sky ain't so blue, heading more towards white and the white puffy clouds are just bigger white blotches in the picture. This is be your camera didn't have enough dynamic range to capture that whole scene. Your eyes have amazing dynamic range and can adjust quite quicky to different focal points. The camera can't. When you're looking at something, you have probably about a 40-50mm equivelant view when comparing to a camera. However, you also have your peripheral vision that sees almost 180 degrees up, down, sideways, catycorner, etc. While none of your human vision outside that 40-50mm is truely "in focus", you see it and can look around in less than a blink of an eye and refocus your eyes on something else.
Image size. This is where what I was talking about your vision above comes in. Now, you take a wide angle picture of a lake or what have you, you look at it on the tiny LCD of the camera or even on your computer screen at home. It's no where near what you thought you saw. But, print that out to a size that you can get up into it and have a full 180 degree view of it where you have to move your eyes or turn your head to look at the whole image and it will look much better. I find the larger I print, the more the image looks like what I was seeing. I have a 30x44 inch print of a cave I was in and it looks so much more realistic than an 8x10 print of it. Because I can walk up to that 30x44 image and turn my head to look around. Refocus on different areas of the image and so forth. I can see the grains of sand at my feet in it, where I can't see the individual grains in the 8x10.
Your memory (mind) will mess with you too. You'll take pictures on vacation, get home and remember it differently. This all has to do with everything above. The lens distorting the image or not capturing enough of the image or The colors are different. However, your camera may have reproduced the color fairly accurately, but your mind thinks it remembered it differently, a dull dreary day doesn't look so dreary in the image, but you remembered that it was REALLY dreary because it ruined your vacation that day. You thought a sunrise was much more colorful than it really was because you were having such a great time...
The images in Post #10 were high megapixels, yes, all of them were 10, 12 and 16 megapixel images before resizing for the web and what you see on the web is only less than .5 megapixel of information. Take a look at the image link in post #45. That was done with 2 megapixels and resized for the web to less than .5 megapixel too. The detail is all there in the full shot, but you won't be able to look at it very large either in print or on your screen. Resized for the web, there isn't much difference between a 16 megapixel shot and the 2mp shot. I could have taken any of those images in post #10 with that old 2mp cam, with the exception of the snowflake which required a very specialized lens and would have looked pretty much the same as if I had taken it with the 10-16mp cams. Again, the exception would be how large you could look at it in print or on screen. Of course the larger mp cams with their higher end glass would look much better larger. But for a standard 11x14 inch print or smaller, your 4mp point and shoot will look just fine.
There's a lot to understanding your cameras capabilities and I better stop now before I put you all to sleep. But keep one thing in mind when using your camera. Include only what you want in the picture, don't crop or "zoom in" on the image later. This will degrade your image considerably depending on what you intend to use the image for.
If you want, I can talk more, but for now, I'll leave it at this.
To Swampy, very nice. I kind of understand some of this inherently, but I'd like to learn how to use the settings on my camera better.
I like taking lower res photos and just looking at them on my computer screen (about 175k and under), but I like it to fill the screen.
So your 12 M photos are set to come up here in the size of the screen or less, but can't you zoom way into the photo without getting distortion? Isn't that one difference between 12meg and 2meg?
To COflower on Hotel Colorado; I had the best shower in my life in that place. Isn't that the place that had the river come right into the restaurant and you could pick your trout for the cooks to prepare? I heard they did this way back in the early 1900's or something. Maybe I had too much rum that day.
There was a hotel called The Raffael; Could that be Glenwood Springs, or is that Aspen? Thx.
To Vfrpilot; bet it don't look like that today. How much snow you get last night?
My balcony at work just a day and a half after 83 F Deg:
A great place for Sloppers and a beer in Pueblo: not bad for a drive-by pic
Last edited by McGowdog; 04-17-2008 at 01:28 PM..
Reason: add
Great pictures, everyone. Please, get some pictures up quick of the blue sky and sunshine, and newly green grass and flowers, we have today, so you don't fuel the rumors that we have snow 10 months of the year.
To Swampy, very nice. I kind of understand some of this inherently, but I'd like to learn how to use the settings on my camera better.
I like taking lower res photos and just looking at them on my computer screen (about 175k and under), but I like it to fill the screen.
So your 12 M photos are set to come up here in the size of the screen or less, but can't you zoom way into the photo without getting distortion? Isn't that one difference between 12meg and 2meg?
Well, lets get things a little more clear to start. My images are shot at 10, 12 and 16 megapixels depending on the camera I'm using. Those images take up 30, 38 and 50 megabytes per picture on the hard drive.
A "landscape" picture is where the picture is wider than it is tall and a "portrait" picture is where the picture is taller than it is wide.
I shoot mostly with my 16 megapixel camera and the image size ends up being 4,992 pixels wide and 3,320 pixels tall when I take a landscape (reverse those numbers for when I shoot a portrait).
The more pixels you have, the clearer your image will be to some extent, even if it's "shrunk down" to fit on your screen and of course if the image size in pixels is more than what your screen resolution is set for, then you can zoom in and get more detail when viewing, but you won't be able to see the whole picture.
Most people use a screen resolution around 1024x768 or 1280x1024 (on average). There are some people that are still using old monitors at 800x600 and there's numerous resolutions above 1280x1024 of course. Like my main screen's resolution is 2560x1600 for example. Lots of pixels can be viewed on my screen.
Now, What I end up doing is taking the 16 megapixel image and sizing it from 4992x3320 down to about 800x533 to put on the web. When I save this 800x533 image, it goes from a 50 megabyte TIF file to a JPG file ranging in general of around 80-150 kilobytes in size. I save that JPG as a different name, saving the original file for other uses and I upload that small JPG to my website for posting up where ever.
This is by far the best way to go about things. Not taking a small picture to begin with. I'm guessing that you have absolutely no plans on printing your images? If this is truely the case and you only want to view them on the screen, then shooting a smaller picture will probably be a good way for you to go to save you all kinds of work with resizing the image for the web.
But I still recommend shooting at a higher resolution and resizing for the web. It's not all that hard to resize either. If you're running Windows XP, there's a power tool free from Microsoft that will resize the image(s) very fast and all you gotta do is right click on the image(s), click on resize and pick your size. A second or so later, you have a copy of the image resized and small for the web.
If you're not real comfortable with the different settings of your camera, you should get to know them and how they work better for sure though. It can make a world of difference between a plain image and one that really stands out.
Great pictures, everyone. Please, get some pictures up quick of the blue sky and sunshine, and newly green grass and flowers, we have today, so you don't fuel the rumors that we have snow 10 months of the year.
Can't take one yet, have to wait for all the snow to melt first. I thought we had 10 months of snow here? Ok, I just checked, we can have 8 months of snow here. 2006-2007, at least here where I am, we got snow in October and the last snow was at the END of May!
Ok ok. here, I dug this one up. No snow. Just a tornado in front of my house.
It never did touch down and only lasted a few minutes, but that was cool.
I think a rule should be in this thread that you can't post unless you post a picture. Just my thinking anyway, not that it's actually a rule now...
Suzco- The sky was amazing with the contrast of the mountains and snow. It was taken during one of my trips while commuting from San Diego in a tiny(2 seat) plane.
McGowdog- We got maybe 3-4". Enough to cause a 2-hour school delay for our daughter.
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Go Broncos!
