It may seem odd in the present day when high quality digital images are so easy to take on a mobile phone or a camera, but 30+ years ago, digital technology was only just developing and digital cameras were costly. Hence, all of the photographs up to and including the Lakeland Round in 1995 were taken with a Ricoh semi-automatic, coupled rangefinder camera with 40mm f2.8 lens. This camera was used because my aged Pentax SV SLR was rather heavy, especially with any of its extra lenses. For landscape photography, the Ricoh proved quite adequate, although its lens was not as sharp as those of the Pentax. However, at apertures of f5.6 or smaller, it gave quite acceptable results, even though it did suffer from some vignetting (darkening towards the corners). Some of the photographs were taken using a polarising filter to improve the colour saturation, although this is only effective in certain conditions, mainly when the sun is shining from one side.
For landscape photography, especially in conditions of less than ideal lighting, I am firmly of the opinion (or was of the opinion at the time), that slides, projected onto a large screen, give the nearest thing to reality that it is possible to achieve. On a long walk, the weather cannot be relied upon to provide good conditions for photography, yet there is still a desire to take photographs as a record of the walk. Hence, I used colour slides as the best option for recording the walks, without a thought that these mayb be used online. The only audience would be family and friends as well as the occasional talk to a village group who may have been interested and image quality was a consideration as they would generally be projected onto a large screen.
My favourite slide film has always been Kodachrome 25 (and its predecessor Kodachrome II) because of its superb resolution, fine grain and colour balance. The downside, however, is its slow speed, which can pose problems in poor lighting conditions, although it is generally possible to get around this by using slower shutter speeds for static subjects.
It was not until 1999 that I set up my own website and decided to put the walks online that I started looking at ways to convert the photos into digital format. The copying of slides was done using a Sharp digital camcorder, which had just been bought for my younger daughter's eighteenth birthday present. The lens on this camera would, quite incredibly, focus close enough to take in a 35mm slide directly, and even closer to select part of a slide. No doubt the lens was not performing at its optimum in these circumstances, but the results were quite presentable, especially with the aid of digital enhancement. By modifying an old projector, I was able to provide back-lighting for the slides and a mount to hold the camcorder, thus making the process fairly easy. The images were captured using a Zipshot, and resulted in 640x480 resolution images of about 900kb prior to compression into jpeg format, where they typically ended up at about 80kb. After some cropping and a higher level of compression, they generally reduced to between 20kb and 50kb. At this time digital storage was very limited and the camcorder recorded them on tape which was the only way of holding the initially scanned images.
Digital enhancement was then performed using a combination of the Arcsoft software supplied with Zipshot, and Microsoft Photo Editor and this reduced the file sizes to an acceptable level to use on the website, though it was still necessary to limit the numbers. Some of the better ones, taken in ideal conditions, came out presentable though in poor weather conditions they leave a lot to be desired though they are still needed to illustrate the walks.
At that time, most people were using dial-up connections to connect to the internet with typical speeds of 14k bits/sec which was bad enough for plain text but even worse for digital images, hence there was a need to minimise these as much as possible. The ways of doing this were: reduce the total number of images, reduce image size and reduce image quality, so a combination of all of these were used for the photos I had taken on earlier walks.
From 1999 onwards, which was when I first started putting my walks online, photographs were taken with my newly acquired Minolta Dynax 500 SLR with its excellent 35-70mm zoom lens, having upgraded from my previous Ricoh camera. This camera did not weigh much more than the Ricoh and had all the advantages of modern technology and lens design. The great improvement in weight had come about by the development of tough, dimensionally stable plastics, which enabled them to be used for both the camera body and the lens.
This was a big step forward from what I had used in my walks up to 1995 where I took colour slides which then had to be scanned to produce digital images for the website. Also, storage of the images was not so restricted so by 1999 I didn't have to restrict image quality too much, though this was still kept to about 600px wide because of the slow downloading speeds that most people still experienced at the time. Home monitors at the time were generally 640px wide so there was little point in using higher resolution. In fine weather, the photos were acceptable but, unless you are very lucky, there are days when the results are not very good. With the latest technology, there are many things that can be corrected automatically by cameras and also very good software that can be used to enhance the poorer images.
Most of these shots were hand held, often in strong winds, where it was difficult to keep the camera steady. In some of the later walks, I took along a monopod, and then a miniature tripod to help stabilise the camera in difficult conditions, although the latter required some convenient wall or fence to be available, which was often not the case.
As time progressed, I got a Fuji Finepix 9000 digital camera. This made a huge difference in the ease of putting them on the website. No longer was it necessary to scan in several boxes of 35mm slides before putting them on my computer and then trying to get the best colour balance and contrast by maipulating them with photo editing software, editing out any specks of dust that had appeared in the process and cropping them to get the best features of the pictures. The digital images still needed some manipulation and editing but this was normally quite quick and easy using Picasa (photo editing progrem by Google).
By this time, the memory available on computers had increased by a large amount and internet users were generally achieving faster download speeds than those using old dial-up modems. Hence there was no longer the need for drastic reduction in image quality in order to limit the file sizes. These factors also meant that I could show a larger selection of photos without making pages too slow to download.
Although there were now fewer limiting factors, there was still a need to limit image quality and size to some extent but I found that images of about 600x400 pixels gave acceptable quality when viewed on a screen and this was about the screen size of home computers at the time. This still meant, however, that to see the images at their best was not possible but the convenience of viewing them without a projector in a darkened room largely compensated for this, though I still had the longing for seeing them with the same quality as could be achieved with 35mm slides.
Another advantage of the digital camera was that it could capture good quality images in poor light conditions without the need for a tripod. Using slow slide films for best resolution meant that in high winds in bad weather condition it was often difficult to avoid camera shake. With the digital camera it was possible to use faster shutter speeds to avoid this. Later developments in technology has meant that taking images can be delayed until a stable image is detected and also multiple images can be taken so that the best one can be selected.
In 2014, for my 70th birthday, I was given a Panasonic DMC-TZ40 digital camera at 4896 x 3672 px resolution. This is a compact camera with 20x optical zoom and weighs about 200 grams, making it ideal for use on a long walk. I had a mobile phone with as well but the results were not up to the same standard and any zooming was digital rather than optical so, where a telephoto shot was required, the image quality would fall. Although the results are excellent, the main limitation with this camera is that the image is viewed on a screen at the back and in bright sunlight it is difficult to see clearly what image is being taken. It is often a matter of 'point and shoot' with a guess at to whether it is capturing the image that you want. This is particularily true with telephoto shots. Of course, there is the ability to take multiple shots and then select the best one later.
As the relentless march of technology goes on, The speed and capacity of everything moves on at an incredible rate so it would now (2023) be possible to use photos at full resolution, though this still seems rather wasteful for general purposes. However, it opens up a better alternative to projected slides by utilising the high resolution of HD and UHD televisions as well as large computer monitors to show the photographs at their best.