Site Contributions All readers are welcome to contribute their own input to this site, regardless of skill level. The time it takes for me to post contributions will depend on how many I receive, and what my work schedule is like for the month. I post contributions in the order in which they were received. It may take up to a month to post your contributions. If you don't see your items posted by two months after submittal, drop me a line, and let me know. Perhaps it got lost. If you send in numerous contributions at one time, I will spread them out over several updates. I will not edit the content of any contributions unless asked (although I will edit the formatting). If I find something objectionable, I will confer with the writer about changing it. If you wish me to proof-read for typos, I would be happy to; just let me know. I'm still finding typos in my own reviews, even after proof-reading them a dozen times! Please do not type in ALL CAPS, as I simply cut and paste from your email. If you are not completely comfortable writing in English, I will be very happy to edit the spelling and grammar for you. I highly encourage international contributions. Please send all contributions to: dougc (at) 172shermans (dot) com Gallery This is a place to submit photographs of your favorite kits, but without a construction review. Simply send in photographs of your kit, and the name, and manufacturer of the kit in the email. I'll do the rest. (See Photo Guidelines below.) Construction Reviews Feel free to be as verbose as you'd like, keeping in mind that the longer the text, the more interesting it needs to be to keep the reader's attention. For the narrative, please write it in the body of your email, or send it as a .txt file attached to your email. You can also attach it as an HTML or MS Word file (but text files are preferred). If you do your own HTML, follow the same format seen in the other reviews. Do not include price information or advertising in the review, unless the kit was provided to you as a review sample from either a retailer or manufacturer. In such cases, you must credit the source of the kit. Don't spend any time on the historical background of the vehicle being modeled; there are plenty of other sites out there for that purpose. Focus on the kit itself: what most impressed you about it, major weaknesses or errors, construction hassles, and descriptions of any additional work or changes you did to the basic model. Descriptive comparisons to kits of the same vehicle from other manufacturers are good too. For negative criticisms of the kit, please be constructive rather than derogatory. But please don't hesitate to review poor kits; this forum is meant to help fellow modelers. If you wish to make any claims about the scale accuracy of the kit, you must include the references you used to make such a judgement; simply stating that "It looks too small to me" is not adequate. Feel free to review models which have already been reviewed. Include as many photographs that you feel are necessary to show all important aspects of the model. eMail Policy Due to the spread of email viruses, my policy is to post email addresses in the following format: Doug Chaltry - doug(at)172shermans(dot)com I will post contributors' email addresses to encourage discussion of their models. If you prefer to not have your email posted at all, let me know and I will leave it off. If you do not keep your virus scanner up-to-date, please remove my email address from your address book! Photo Guidelines I usually edit most photographs that are submitted in order to fit their size in with the site guidelines. I will also sometimes adjust color, contrast, brightness and sharpness of images to improve their display quality. I have a pretty good graphics program that allows me to do this, but you all could help me out some if you could do some of this yourself before sending the photos. If you can't, that's OK, I'll take care of it. Remember, it's always better to send an image that is too large, and have me reduce it, than to send an image that is too small, which I can do nothing about. File Naming - Please follow these rules:
Examples:
Picture format - Send color photographs as .jpg's. Size - There are two types of size to discuss here: the size (in Kilobytes) of the .jpg file, and the size (in pixels) of the image on the screen. Try to keep the file size of each image to less than 100K. The best way to do this is to make the photo size about 800 pixels wide. Save the .jpg at 85% quality (15% compression). You can send several images in a single email, but keep the total email size below about 1MB. Composition - In order to maximize the viewable area of the subject, composition of the image is important. Note that we are not looking for artistic perfection here (unless the image is of a diorama, perhaps), but rather the goal is to get the best view of the subject in the smallest image size. This is done by cropping. The following image is 600 pixels wide, and it has a file size of 37K:
I want to reduce the file size to make it faster to download, so reduce it to 400 pixels wide:
But notice how the subject has shrunk to the point where it is almost too small to see clearly. So instead of simply shrinking the original image, first crop the image to isolate the subject, as seen here, in the original 600 pixel-wide image:
The cropped image in only 450 pixels wide, so that resizing it to 400 pixels has a very small effect on the size of the subject:
This photo is 400 pixels wide, just like the second image above, yet because of the cropping, the subject is much larger. The file size (25.7K) is slightly larger than that second photo (21.1K) because this one has a greater height, but compared to the original, it is much more manageable. Because I was using 600 pixel and 400 pixel wide images in this demo, the file size differences are not great. Also, these photos have a lot of solid blocks of color in them, which makes for a smaller file size. For photos that start at 1200 pixels or larger, and for those with lots of colors, reducing them to 800, or 600 pixels, will reduce their file size significantly. |
