Hi, I've been enjoying your photos and was wondering what camera you used - I found from your site that it's an Ixus. The images are great at 640x480 - what size are the originals, and how much processing did you do?

All of the photos here were taken w/a Canon Powershot S400, also known as the Digital Ixus. I've now had it for 2.5 years and it's still working like new and I couldn't be more pleased. Ok, I do wish it could do all it does and be half as thick and half as heavy, but hey, we can't have everything, right?

I generally take all photos w/the "Superfine" setting and at 1600x1200 pixels. The camera's top setting would be 2272x1704, but that has always seemed like overkill. I do very little processing. I'm a little embarrassed to admit that for most photos I just hit "enhance" in iPhoto, but when that doesn't do what I want I also often boost the sharpness and play w/the exposure or contrast/brightness to get the best effect. I almost never use photoshop for photos that appear here -- that takes way too much time.

For final posting I use a small application called "EasyBatchPhoto" that reduces the photos to 80kb or less and 640x480 in size. I've tried many other ways of scaling down the photos and found that different programs will give you different results even when the file size ends up the same. Whatever method EasyBatchPhoto uses seems to work pretty well in the size/quality compromise. EasyBatchPhoto also allows you to preserve the Exif data when you scale the photos; if you download any photos from the site or have some other way of getting to the Exif data, it should all be there for each photo.