Over the last week I’ve spent a lot of time going through our F1 photos from Silverstone 2012. I had been using some third-party software which, I have to admit, was most excellent. The trouble with third-party programs for websites is that you can rarely get them to look exactly as though they’re part of the main site. Thus I made the decision to use Antenna’s photo gallery (Antenna is the software that I’ve been using, for some years, to design the site).
When I originally used the Antenna gallery it had some annoying bugs in it so I quickly threw it aside. The bugs have been pretty much ironed out although it’s not as configurable as I would like.
Anyway the photos, in their native configuration, are large 4000 x 3000 pixel photos each weighing in at around 2mb. Far too big. So the last few days have been cropping the pictures so that I pick out only the required parts. You have to remember that F1 cars move at speeds anything up to 200 mph so, when taking the photos you’ll probably get a lot of the surrounding scene in order to get the car in-shot. That, at least, was my problem although I very much suspect there are better ways to take such pictures. Thanks, however, to the high pixel-count in our Canon Powershot SX40HD, trimming (or cropping) the pictures doesn’t leave you with a low-definition result.
Whilst cropping them I then had to make sure that each photo would fit in the set frame-size that I had created in the gallery. Of course the gallery will happily fit a photo that’s not in the frame’s proportions into the frame but my OCD had kicked in and I didn’t want to leave gaps in the frame. Having set the frame to 700 x 500 pixels I then had to crop each picture to be in the same proportions. As I was trimming I had a notebook beside me with multiples and divisibles of the frame size. In that way I kept the proportions correct and was then able to resize each trimmed photo to the frame size without any distortion.
After that I added a bunch of comments to the photos so all you non-F1 folk can get an idea of what you’re looking at. On Saturday Fox and I were parked on the National Pit Straight from where we could get shots of the straight and also Woodcote off to our right and Copse to our left. Later on we headed into the Woodcote stands where there are good views of the Wellington Straight which then heads into Brooklands, Luffield, Woodcote 1 and 2 and the National Pit Straight.
There are some ninety photos now in the gallery and these are all from Saturday 7th July (2012) and I’m working on a second gallery for Race Day (8th July).
In time I may utilise some other funky features within Antenna like the slideshow and/or rollover features but, for now, there’s a clean, good looking gallery that I hope will be worth a look. I was chatting with my Dad last night and saying that I’d like to take some photos of things other than racing around Silverstone so, you never know, in time there may be some pictures of the local countryside…well I did promise him that I wouldn’t put the pictures of me, naked, up there!! 