Family Pictures, How They Have Changed!

As I was making sure that my Nikon D-40 SLR Digital Camera was charged up and there was plenty of room on my 2 gigabyte secure digital card so everything would be ready to take to my parent’s house for Easter, I thought back at how photography has changed over the past few years. I remember my first digital camera had a resolution of 640 x 480 and started with around 1 mega pixel. This camera has 6.1 mega pixels and has more bells and whistles than I think I will ever use. I keep the pictures at 6.1 mega pixels so when I crop or edit the pictures they will be of excellent quality. Leaving the picture size at maximum resolution I have been able to crop small section of the picture and it still turn out well when printed.

As I have been working with my Dad on his blog I see the limited photographs that show him growing up. I have more that were taken when I was growing up and even more when my daughters were growing up. All these combined don’t equal the number of photographs that we have taken in the past few years. Now, we are free from the long process of taking 12, 24, or 36 pictures on a roll of film and after it is shot, carefully rewinding, removing the roll, and taking it to a store to have it developed.

I am having the best of times with Isaac, my first grandchild. I am already teaching him to call me Gramps and how to stand up and sit down. The picture that is flipping on this page is a four month picture of him. I edited a digital picture using an Internet based free service, BeFunky Cartoonizer to transform one of Isaac's photographs to this cartoon picture. The statement, "I love puppies" did not come out on the cartoon very clear so I decided to edit the words on the t-shirt to Gramp's Big Boy. To use the BeFunky Cartoonizer, you have to register but there is no cost to create the cartoons. After registering, you click on Cartoonizer then upload a picture, crop, then click on cartoonizer to sketch and then color. If you want to tweak a little you may want to try your hand using warp. Once you have your picture edited the way you want, print screen then crop down to the picture. You can save the picture to your account. You can even order, mugs, t-shirts, posters, or share the photo on a social networking site.

Another service that turns a picture into a conversation piece is Pictosaic. This is an online photo mosaic creator which can take an uploaded picture and turn it into a mosaic in a few seconds. Upload a picture, make choices of little pictures that will make up the picture. I like to have the original picture as one of the pictures so folks can locate it when viewing the picture. Isaac’s mom, Betsy, send the picture to SnapFish and they printed an 11” x 17” photograph which seemed the perfect size for this.

Sometimes you may want to resize your picture if it is too large or change the file type of a picture. I found a site that will do that for you. Gary’s Hood - Convert And Resize An Image - This web page will convert a .png, .gif, .jpg, .jpeg, .bmp, or .ico into any image format and size. The max image size to be uploaded is 5 megabytes and the max resolution to convert an image is 1280 x 1024. Animated gifs can be resized, but cannot be converted to another format.

I look forward to a day with my family, eating plenty of food and taking some memorable pictures!