[birding] Cropping photos of rare birds

[David Irons]

Greetings All,

This is for all of you who like to document rare
birds and get your images published in North American Birds and
elsewhere on actual paper. Please save your high resolution original
photos of rare birds. For the purposes of North American Birds, for
which I serve as a Regional Editor (Oregon and Washington Region), the
photo editor informs me that digital images in files smaller than 0.5MB
(or 500KB) are all but useless when printed. They may look great on
your computer monitor, but they will not reproduce well on paper. 

I
consistently get photo submissions that have been cropped to the point
where they are no more than 50-100KB in size. Files this small will
only look good in print if they are about the size of a small postage
stamp. I know there is a temptation to make the bird as big as
possible, I do it myself, but we are missing out on many opportunities
to publish important photos. 

Last spring I actually resorted
to taking a photograph of a small file picture that I had up on my
monitor. Using this method I was able to create a larger file image of
the Red-billed Tropicbird photographed off of Florence by Larry Hawley.
Thankfully, the burlap look of the monitor feedback does not show up in
the printed image. This may well be the first and hopefully last use of
digi-monitoring. First state records require extraordinary effort.

Thanks,

Dave Irons
Regional Editor North American Birds (Oregon and Washington Region)


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