I'm interested in your response to the following download:

http://www.robertappleby.com/personal/album.pdf

I realise that the pictures were taken with a contax rather than a leica, but i'm trying to garner some responses to the use of pdf as a way of publishing images on-line. I'd be grateful for any responses, either on this forum or directly.

Thanks,

-- rob (rob@robertappleby.com), December 17, 2001

Answers

Hi Rob!

I can't download anything here. Your picture of the three kiddies on the street in India definitely proves that you're a good photograph (even if it wasn't a Leica, har har). Unfortunately (for me), the picture(s) you mentioned in your posting here (as /personal/album.pdf) is a pdf-file. I don't like pdf-files because it takes too long to download and to also open them and then I can't reformat or adjust anything at all. Like margin widths etc. Even if only on a table or on a page of text. I use Adobe's Acrobat 5.0.5. I don't have any suggestions for better image publishing, but I (myself) would never even try to publish anything using pdf.

Still, best regards and lots of luck. Mike

-- Michael Kastner (kastner@zedat.fu-berlin.de), December 17, 2001.

As a presentation method, it works, once the hook is in to make me want to wait, but as a web system, the only way I'd tolerate waiting for all of that to download was if I was absolutely SURE it would be worth it (as I was, since it was you.) Normally, if I went to a random site and there wasn't some normal html preview of what I was opening up to assure me it was worth it, I probably wouldn't bother to wait for it to download, which took a LONG time.

-- Michael Darnton (mdarnton@hotmail.com), December 17, 2001.

Robert, thank you for the beautiful images. I like the pdf file as a way to download photographs. I have both a cable modem and an ADSL modem that allow rapid downloads, so no problem with large files.

-- David (pagedt@chartertn.net), December 17, 2001.

Michael Kastner

in acrobat you can set the viewing size and whether to be full page or in a window. I think it's more flexible than html because you can view it at different magnifications.

This is really a first step towards _publication_ rather than just posting images, which is why I'm doing this little opinion poll.

Michael Darnton (sorry, I have to distinguish between Michaels here) your point about an html preview is well taken, thanks. This was just a test of the pdf mechanism, but obviously, integrated into a website would require a html gallery as an intro or taster.

Thanks for the feedback.

R.

-- rob (rob@robertappleby.com), December 17, 2001.

Nice images, and an intresting way to present them. As someone said above, since you have to wait for the download, you need to be sure it's 'worth' it. Maybe thumbnails on the web page? What I like about it is that it's a single package- your statement, and the photos.

There have been some sites that seem to use Flash or something- where everything seems to load in at first, and so viewing them is truly like a slide show.

-- Tse-Sung (tsesung@yahoo.com), December 17, 2001.

Hi Rob,

Thank you for sharing the photographs. It is like browsing through one of those small Magnum books. My favourite is the one with the white elephant. Being a lost existentialist, I love found meanings in strange juxtapositions. Whether it is actualy exists is a question for another discipline and forum.

It was a quick download on my cable modem but I can see that people with 56k modems would be waiting a long time. Regardless, I do feel the files are too small. Edges and transistions are a little rough and the palette of tones limited. I think that a larger file size would be a good step. You could have it available for download in two resolutions along with aproximate download times. Mind you I am sure the people with 56k modems would then end up downloading it twice....

-- John Collier (jbcollier@powersurfr.com), December 17, 2001.

Simple tourist indeed! As usual, stunning images Rob.

I am with the others here on the Acrobat download. I have DSL, and still had to wait an agonizing 30 or 40 seconds for the document to fully download. However, once here it was a pleasure to peruse! If you are looking into web publishing methods, I would take a good look at Flash. If you want the recipient to be able to easily print what you send them, Acrobat works very well once you get past the download. BTW, Flash also supports sound, so you can actually publish a complete multimedia-type presentation.

Cheers,

-- Jack Flesher (jbflesher@msn.com), December 17, 2001.

Rob:

I got an error message trying to see this with the Netscape Acrobat plug-in - may just be a memory problem at my end.

I've been experimenting with .pdfs myself as a way of making photographic "E-books". Web publication remains so limited by bandwidth/download time that html still seems the most reasonable technique to use on this medium. A book-length PDF even at screen resolution (100 images at 300K each) is still 30 megabytes to download. A good web designer can make an effective presentation work in html, and because it loads sequentially, at least you have something to look at while other images download. Digitaljournalist.org has a large number of photo-essays available in this form.

One technique you might consider - make the .pdf a downloadable Stuff- It file for opening and viewing off-line - this might save some download time by additonal compression.

Even the text-only "ebooks" seem to have been a flop so far - there hasn't been a convergence between market, technology, format and contaent yet.

I have a couple of Macromedia Director/CD-based photo books from Rick Smolan - originator of the the "Day in the Life of..." books - "Passage to Vietnam" and "From Alice to Ocean". They are beautiful productions. But even with those examples as a leading light digital photo publishing has never taken off.

But keep working at it - eventually SOME format and SOME distribution network will catch on.

-- Andy Piper (apidens@denver.infi.net), December 17, 2001.

Hello Rob-

I love the elephant and the hedge pruned to human form. All your photos here tie together very well for me. I think you should shoot more than once every ten years...

-- jeff voorhees (debontekou@yahoo.com), December 17, 2001.

Thanks everyone for the feedback. This was just testing the waters for a larger project, I'll keep you posted.

-- rob (rob@robertappleby.com), December 18, 2001.

I really like these pictures Rob. Somehow, they look like they are more than just a few years old, more like the India of 35 years ago. I can't quite put my finger on it... Have to think about this a bit.

As for the .pdf format, I had no problems with speed or viewing at my high speed workstation at work, but I have received not dissimilar photo portfolios in .pdf by email in the past, at home. They were quite a nuisance to view, due to my slow home line.

So I would advise against mass emailing attached .pdf presentations such as this one...Someone or the other who is a vital member of the audience may end up struggling to process it on their ancient computer.

On the other hand, the .pdf really does work in a very book-like way, compared to most web-based, multimedia type photo portfolios (such as the ones at digitaljournalist.org).

I guess I'm trying to say that the pdf has some of the snappy, page turning quality of a book, that makes it very appealing...

I'm really not in a position to comment on image quality tradeoffs regarding pdfs and other methods. The pdf pictures seem a bit more work-print like, somehow. But I can't be sure.

-- Mani Sitaraman (bindumani@pacific.net.sg), December 18, 2001.

Mani, that's an interesting comment. Another friend of mine, not Indian, but married to a Bengali woman (Ketaki Kushari, ring any bells?) also said that it didn't look like India to him. I think it's very much a newcomer's view, not the eye of someone who knows India at all well. I hope my later stuff is more convincing!

-- rob (rob@robertappleby.com), December 18, 2001.

Rob,

I mainly subscribe to everything already said: Great pictures which I loved to review. I think pdf is an interesting alternative to online viewing (I don't mind download times if I'm really teased into getting the stuff). It's a very comfortable means to keep things together (and download them in one single step) and to make viewers "revisit" your portfolio. The most attractive feature is the combination of (searchable!) text and images (tip: make even your images searchable by keywords, even "hidden" ones, like white on white!). The resizability is very attractive, too. As for fonts: My machine didn't have Garamond loaded - so you might consider packaging a (compressed) pdf file with the necessary font file, if layout and look of the text is critical...?! For curiosity: How complicated was the production of this e-booklet? What did it take you, time and softwarewise? Keep up the excellent photo work - looking forward to future presentations of yours. Cheers.

-- Lutz Konermann (lutz@konermann.net), December 18, 2001.

Lutz

I use Pagemaker and Photoshop, Vuescan for scanning. These are all tools which require a certain familiarity, but both photoshop and vuescan have powerful batch processing features, which is essential for this kind of quick production. With these tools (and my rather basic skill set) it took me about two hours to produce the pdf from scratch, including scanning. I could have spent more time on tweaking the images (including a bit of spotting) but the aim was to see what people's reaction to the pdf as a medium was, the images were not so important.

Probably the most time consuming thing overall was writing the foreword - I'm not very good at that sort of thing!

-- rob (rob@robertappleby.com), December 18, 2001.

This was a very nice way to look at those nice photos! Once loaded (which did take quite a while) I found it the best way of presentation I have seen on the web!

-- Peter Olsson (peter.olsson@lulebo.se), December 18, 2001.

Rob, does PageMaker come with a pdf(-producing) plug-in? Or did you use Acrobat (full version) and imported PageMaker files?

-- Lutz Konermann (lutz@konermann.net), December 18, 2001.

Lutz, all you've got to do is download the generic postscript printer driver from adobe and install it as a printer on lpt1 or whatever, and then distiller will compose for that printer, which results in a pdf. I don't have the full acrobat application, although I'll have to get it eventually as pagemaker doesn't have a full set of pdf controls.

-- rob (rob@robertappleby.com), December 18, 2001.