Information about pictures:
If possible, take more than one picture of a species, for instance: total in the field, detail and
close of flower(s).
You may send your pictures by normal mail, as dias-strips (if possible, do not frame
them), or as strips of negatives.
Or you may send them digitalized, to my E-mail adres: aart@knoware.nl. In that case, they
must be compressed to a JPEG-file, whose name corresponds with the species-name and
ends upon .jpeg. For instance: "Digitalis purpurea ssp mariana.1.jpeg"
Either way they must be accompanied by a list of:
- (number of dia).
- name of species, subspecies, family;
- means of classification (name of flora).
- date of found.
- place of found.
- if posible: a description of the species.
About making pictures:
The following notions may help to make
good, usable pictures of plants/flowers:
- a good, sharp picture can be compressed to about 50k and still be a good picture, but:
- do not compress your pictures to much(see above);
- wind is perhaps the greatest ennemy of outdoor pictures. Even
with a very short exposure-time there is no garanty that a picture is sharp
enough. So, do not take outdoor pictures of flowers when there is more then a
little wind, or:
- place a shield around your object, so that the wind is neutralized;
- sharp sunlight is another negative point: if possible take your pictures
under shadowing conditions (or create them).
- background often gives too little contrast, so it is
advisable to correct the background, for example by placing a neutral board
behind your object (moderate grey will do fine);
- a moderate gray background also may help the automated process of making Photo-CD
pictures of good exposure-quality.
- it is often necesary to free your object of to much of the surrounding plants:
this "cleaning up" can make a lot of difference;
- a very good way to make an excellent pictures of a plant is to place it in an
artificial surroundings, with as much surrouning light as possible.
All pictures in the first versions of this flora were taken with Kodak films,
which were then converted to Kodak Photo-CD's. A good working methode is via dia-film:
no extra printings are necesary, while the pictures can be selected on a simple plateau,
viewing them through a loupe.
An AppleScript program and a Perl-script were written to create the www-pages from a
FMPro-database.
Warning:
The Kodak Photo-CD methode is very good, but it is clearly automated:
there is no much garanty, that your (excellent) pictures will be as readable on a Photo-CD.
They might be to dark, or to light, and in both instances much information is lost,
and this lost can not be corrected. (See also above about the moderate grey background).
These mistakes can most of the time be corrected by "the man behind te machine", simply
by setting the exposure-time to the object (your flower), instead of letting the machine compute an
average exposure-time.
So, do not accept CD-pictures that are clearly out of line. A good arrangement with the
intermediary photo-shopkeeper can be important.
A.Voswinkel; email: aart@knoware.nl