Weekend F3F Photos & Gallery Tools

I was fortunate enough to fly in this weekends local (SCSR League) F3F race held at Parker Mountain (near Lancaster, CA).

I had fun playing with my new Canon EOS Digital Rebel (the 300D for our Euro friends), and took a few photos of yesterdays F3F race at Parker Mountain.
http://www.sloperacing.com/results/F3F2004/parker_12-11-04/

All photos shot hand held, using either the Kit lens (18-55mm / F3.4-5.6) or my zoom lens (75-300mm / F4-5.6 IS). I have a lot more to learn with this camera, but overall I am quite
happy.



I use a really great simple cheap powerful good looking utility called Express Thumbnail Creator for the final output. This was originally recommended to me by Dave Wenzlick (another soaring buddy).

My typical process for web galleries is as follows:
Step 1: d/l images from camera to hard drive

Step 2: Browse them, sort the keepers from the originals using ACDSee (a fantastic photo viewer/database manager utility)

Step 3: Play with Photoshop as needed

Step 4: Use Express Thumbnail Creator to automate the entire web gallery process, including the thumbnail creation, page creation, titling, watermarks, web optimization, resizing, etc... It takes about 10 minutes to set the options the way you want them, point it to an empty target folder and it runs through everything and spits out a completed web gallery in about 2 minutes once you push the button. What's REALLY nice is that if you want to tweak something, you can recompile just the HTML pages, just the images, or just the thumbs, without having to do the whole thing over again. Once you've got a gallery setting the way you like it, you can save all the settings for reuse later on. Get it here: http://www.neowise.com/etc/

Step 5: I use a hand coding HTML editor called Homesite (from Macromedia) to edit the HTML pages and add captions, but you could also do it simply in notepad if you wanted to

Step 6: Upload to your website of choice!

Cool Tip: Just today I discovered that Express Thumbnail Creator has pre-built variables in the watermark tool to extract and display the EXIF data from the photo, which is how the shutter and focal length info was embedded into the images from the F3F race ( http://www.sloperacing.com/results/F3F2004/parker_12-11-04/)

I have used this program extensively on my personal homepage, for galleries such as this: http://www.woodsfamily.cc/West/2004/mammoth/

All told, this is still a relatively exhaustive effort. I spent at least 4 hours today on the F3F gallery.

For those that are interested, the scores from the race are linked here:
http://www.sloperacing.com/results/scsr.htm

Cheers,
Nathan Woods