Ashland Artisan Gallery had an amazing Grand Opening during the Ashland First Friday Artwalk on February 2. Scores of people came to celebrate the official openning of Ashland’s newest and most exciting gallery.

If you are interested in aquiring one of my fine art photography prints but would like to see some of my work in person or consult with me before placing an order I would be glad to meet with you at the gallery. I am available at Ashland Artisan Gallery every Monday afternoon from 2 PM to 6 PM and you can also arrange to meet with me at the gallery by appointment (click the “Contact” link at the top of the page).

Ashland Artisan Gallery is located at 163 E Main Street in Ashland, Oregon across the street from the Varsity Theater and one block from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The gallery features fine photography, paintings, woodwork, metal work, pottery, jewlery and leaded glass by a distinguished group of southern Oregon artists. The gallery specializes in custom commissions and installations.

One of the great advantages of digital photography is the ability to easily share your photos with others.  In addition to making traditional style prints, digital images can be posted on websites, uploaded to digital personal organizers, displayed on cell phones and emailed.  In my business I email photos on a regular basis.  I email photo submissions to publishers, proofs to commercial clients and archived image samples to stock photo buyers.  But it isn’t just professional photographers who email lots of images.  I also email shots of my kids to the grandparents and photos I took out skiing to my friends.  Emailing digital images is most likely the number one thing that people using digital cameras do with their photos and yet many people don’t have a clue how to optimize their photos for best email performance.

          The most important consideration when emailing photos is image size, especially for those of us with dial-up Internet connections, but also for those with broadband.  If you set your camera to take images at a size that’s right for email then they are too small to make good prints, but if you try to email full size images they take a long time to send and don’t even fit on the screen for viewing.  The solution is resizing.  Most cameras these days come with software that can easily help you resize your images for email.  It is also easy to resize images in image editing software such as Adobe Photoshop.  However you go about sizing your photos, here are a few tips that I follow to make sure that I’m not the guy emailing photos so large that they overfill inboxes, take several hours to download and can’t be viewed without scrolling around.  These tips only apply to photos that are intended to be viewed on screen but not printed.  Print size files need to be large to give good print quality.

First, I like to size my photos so they are about 500 pixels on the longest side and have a resolution of 72 DPI (dots per inch).  This enables them to be viewed on smaller monitors and even within the email message window without opening them full screen.  72 DPI is important because that is about the maximum resolution that a monitor can show.  Images for print often need 300 DPI or more, but this is a lot of extra information that doesn’t make the image look any better on the screen.  A 300 DPI image that is 500 pixels on its longest side contains 16 times more data than the same size image at 72 DPI.

          Second, I save the resized images to be emailed with a different name in a separate email folder.  This way I don’t change the original image file and I can safely delete the resized images from the email folder when I don’t need them any more without accidentally losing the originals. 

Third, I save the email images as JPEG (.jpg) files and set the quality to medium (about 5 on the Photoshop scale) to compress the files even more.  These steps ensure that I am emailing the smallest files possible and that they send quickly, don’t fill up all the space in someone’s inbox and can easily be viewed on screen.

          One more tip if you are using software like Photoshop is to apply unsharp mask (Filter>Sharpen>Unsharp Mask) to the final sized image before saving and sending it.  When you downsize an image it loses some detail that can be brought back with a little sharpening.  Good luck and happy emailing.

Recently I visited the southern Oregon coast twice and made another trip through central Oregon up to the Palouse region of eastern Washington.

The southern Oregon coast from Brookings up to Reedsport is known as one of the most photogenic coastal regions in the world.  With its quaint fishing ports, long sandy beaches, cliffs, rock formations, lighthouses, dunes and a distinct lack of crowds there are endless opportunities to make some great photos.  I find the biggest challenge is being there when the nearly ubiquitous fog bank is not.

The Palouse region of eastern Washington covers a large geographical area in Washington, south of Spokane and north of Lewiston.  In this landscape of gently rolling hills, farmers grow a good portion of the country’s wheat crops.  While interesting photography can be made here all year long the summer months provide the best opportunities.  Late summer is the time when the wheat has been harvested and the fields are burned and plowed, creating a patchwork of abstract amber, black and brown shapes and patterns.

To view images you can go to my main site.