Photo Flora Techniques

Prior to 1996 a Pentax ME Super single lens reflex 35mm film camera was used. From 1996 until 2004 the photographs were taken with a Canon EOS500 single lens reflex 35mm film camera. Since 2004 a Canon EOS 300D digital single lens reflex camera has been used to produce digital images directly.

The lens used for landscapes and general shots is the standard zoom lens supplied with the camera. For the close up pictures a specialist macro lens is normally used often with the addition of a ring flash attachment. This lens focuses directly down to full size (the image on the film is captured at its real size) and with extension tubes this can be increased above full size.

For film-based pictures ISO 200 print film from Kodak or Fuji was normally used processed by a standard developing service with the results returned as 7x5 inch matt-surface prints for incorporation in photograph albums.

Film-based pictures were scanned directly from the negative film using a film scanner.

The scan parameters were carefully chosen to give a 1024x768 pixel 24-bit colour image which is saved as a jpeg file that is typically from 70 to 300kbytes in size. This can be displayed on the monitor at approximately twice the size of the corresponding print.

For display on the web pages the jpeg image has been reprocessed to 512 pixels on the longer side. This reduces the image size on the screen to about the same as a standard print and reduces the file size to about 20-50Kbytes which is more suitable for downloading over the Internet.

All the photos are catalogued in a database. The data from this is extracted by a specially written program to provide the source information for the web page which references the jpeg image. Specific edits to each page are therefore unnecessary so pages can be generated and maintained easily.