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Post by cabintom on Aug 24, 2018 14:08:55 GMT
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Post by nomad on Aug 24, 2018 15:31:05 GMT
Nice work. Are you photographs heading for a website/book or are they for personal reference.
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Post by cabintom on Aug 24, 2018 18:01:35 GMT
Are you photographs heading for a website/book or are they for personal reference. I've been toying with the idea of a website for a couple of years now. The problem I've encountered is that hosting images is expensive especially if the resolution is decent. I may just make a series of pdfs and release those... I don't know... I keep changing my mind. The base reasons for my photographs is as a bit of an insurance policy. I'll be honest and say that I'm not in my line of work for the money and I'll hover at just about "poor" (per western standards) as long as I keep at it. So, practically speaking (and barring any miracles) my collection is staying in Congo as long as I am, and that's risky. At the very least, if I were to lose the entire collection I'll still have high quality images of the specimens, as is the case of the specimens I've donated to ABRI and others.
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Post by nomihoudai on Aug 24, 2018 19:21:18 GMT
Tom, why would a talented photographer like you waste his potential on PDFs? Creating them takes an extended amount of time and they are not updatable. Yes they may be "free" to distribute but a website has the potential to pay back its costs.
You are not the first and not the last entomologist to unfortunately go the PDF route. I am currently working (as you know) on a service to easily host your pictures and content. I hope that this service will soon evolve into an online publishing service for entomology and I hope to get the big museums on board.This would be a much needed step towards the future of entomology.
(BTW, PDFs will downsize your high resolution pics... and then you could just as easily host a cheap website with pictures of smaller resolution. Anything beyond 400kB does not show any additional details on a standard resolution screen).
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Post by cabintom on Aug 24, 2018 20:31:22 GMT
Tom, why would a talented photographer like you waste his potential on PDFs? Creating them takes an extended amount of time and they are not updatable. Yes they may be "free" to distribute but a website has the potential to pay back its costs. PDFs (created through Photoshop/Illustrator) allow for far more creativity in how information is presented than any website layout I'd be able to create, so (in my opinion) it would help maximize the potential of the images. The most time consuming aspect is cutting out the image background, but I would be doing that for images published to a website anyways. Also, operating on a Congolese internet connection makes maintaining and updating a website difficult. For a long time I was uploading my pictures to flickr, but having to attempt multiple reloads of pages just to edit simple text became much too time consuming so I abandoned that. Lastly, I'm cheap. I've only got $50/month budgeted for discretionary funds and I would prefer to use that money to go out and collect the insects rather than pay to display images of them on the internet.
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