Blue Angels practice session, Pensacola, FL
Lawrence I. Charters
April 2001

About These Photos

Blue Angels | Florida Main Page

All photos were taken with a Nikon CoolPix 990 digital camera. Because of memory loss caused by advanced age, the photographer left the camera on autofous (the CoolPix 990 allows you to set the camera to manual focus), so some photos were less clear than they could be because the camera kept trying to adjust the focus between near objects (heads of spectators) and rapidly moving airplanes several thousand feet away. All photos were saved with a setting of "Fine," which on the CoolPix 990 means 2048 x 1536 pixels, with no interpolation.

If you click on the top picture in the left column, you'll see the original, 2048 x 1536 image. This is 1,251,234 bytes in size, and you'll notice the aircraft occupies just a tiny portion of the center of the picture.

The middle picture, left, is a 1280 x 1024 section cropped out of the center of the photo, 790,019 bytes in size. All of the Blue Angels photos were cropped to this size so the photographer could use them with a screen saver in Mac OS X.

The images shown on the Web are 500 pixels across, and were created from the 1280x1024 images mentioned above. The bottom left image is only 23,289 bytes, a significant reduction from the original 1.1 million bytes. Of course, there is also a significant reduction in resolution.