Hi, All.

I have just uploaded the long awaited batch of new Training and Practice
Racing photos to the SCSSA website. For those of you who ask “When you
going to put up more pictures of us skating?”, Please take a minute to
read the explanation below. These photo layouts take *hours* to produce.

First, I have to sort through the few hundred photos I took, and select
the ones that are best for focus, lighting, etc. Then I crop and reduce
the physical size of each photo, one at a time. I reduce the size so
that it will almost fill the window in most browsers, depending on each
person’s settings. Next, I enhance the colors, exposure and focus of
each photos, again one at a time. Lastly, for the photos anyway, I save
each one off compressed to the maximum I can while retaining image
quality. The original photos I take are between 1500 and 2000 Kb. That
means that only one would fit on a floppy, and that image would take a
very long time for you to download. The final images are usually between
60 and 90 kb.

Then I have to create the web page tables. I used to do this by hand,
but I now have a program that does it for me, creating the tables and
thumbnails automatically. But it creates the pages in such a way thay I
need to open each one and do things like centering the table. And when I
do a photo layout for a meet, for instance, I then need to fancy up each
page, adding nice text, the other images, like the SCSSA logo, and the
background image (so the back ground won’t be plain old white.

Finally, I upload the pages with photos and thumbnails up to our server,
ValueWeb, in Florida. I need to put in a plug for them here because
about 6 months ago, I was able to get them to remove the maximum storage
limit on out side, as a sponsorship thing. We were limited to 200 MB of
storage, now we are basically unlimited. Within reason, anyway. That is
why you will notice their logo on our home page.

Whew! OK, now we are done. Since there are two links, Training July 2004
and Practice Races July 28th, just go to the SCSSA Homepage, and look
for the links under the scrolling banner thingy.

http://www.socalspeedskating.org/scssa.htm

Now, did you really read all of that stuff above?? :-\

Cheers!

Jerry

PS: Yes, I did include some photos that are out of focus. Mostly that is
because I didn’t get very many of that person, and I think they can
benefit from at least seeing the photos.