Chinese New Year (Year of the Fire Horse) in 2026 falls on Tuesday, 17 February. In preparation for it, the Chinese community in London has been putting up new lanterns. Lots of them.
You see lanterns strung up in Chinatown all year, and they didn’t look to my casual eye as though they are in need of replacing, until I saw the old ones on the ground after they were taken down.
I took these photos over two days – the first when I was with some other photographers and we happened to walk through Chinatown. The second time a couple of days later when I was walking to Covent Garden and came through Chinatown. The first and the last photos are from the second occasion.
The Bakerloo line has some of the most interesting curves and pathways on the way to the platforms. This is the Bakerloo line at Piccadilly Circus, looking down the paths that lead to the platforms.
Now which way do I go if I want to get to my destination? Ah, there just by where the paths divide are handy lists of the stations along the route.
Problem solved.
However, negotiating London Underground is a pain sometimes. Mostly it is OK, but sometimes not.
You are in the innards of the Underground and you get off at a certain stop.
Now you need to change lines and know you need to be on the Boogaloo line.
You look to see which way you should go to get to your destination.
You see a sign on the platform that says in this direction is Boogaloo North.
Over here in this other direction is the sign for Boogaloo South.
Terrific, but please list the stations along the route each way. I do not have a mental map of the tube in my head to tell me which way..
Ah but surely I have a map to tell me whether my destination is north of south of where I am.
Yes, I do. But the routes of the train lines on the normal tube map are shown on a schematic map.
Compare this schematic with the non-schematic.
Now you see the problem.
Of course, once you get used to getting from A to B via C, or D or wherever, then you learn.
I have another website at photographworks.com. It is self-hosted, meaning that I host in on a host for which I pay a yearly fee. And it is built on the self-hosted version of WordPress. It’s seen a number of twists and turns over the years. For the longest time I reviewed Nikon cameras, and I had affiliate links to Amazon from which I earned almost nothing. That was because – well who knows really – but a part of it was that I wanted to keep the aesthetics of the site and I didn’t want it plastered with ads at the top and the bottom and every conceivable place.
Then I took it down but kept the domain name going. More recently I wrote about photography, and more recently still I took out everything except the portraits.
That was OK but then I was looking at a photographer’s website and it had this neat feature that when you clicked on the image it cycled to the next image in the image stack. And my intention was to copy that layout that had a sidebar with categories of image stacks.
The photographer’s site was built on Squarespace, and I thought maybe I could accomplish that on WP without a plugin but I lost puff trying to figure it out.
Instead I put a simple gallery up in a sticky post to that it is the first thing you see when you visit the site. I didn’t think too hard when choosing the images for the gallery. I just pulled the first fifteen images that fitted the bill.
Well here on photographworks.me I have 4,170 images in the media library. Of course most of them are not portraits, but I pulled these you see in the gallery below.
Those 4,170 images take up a grand total of 678.1 MB out of 13.2 GB upload limit (5%) on my Premium plan. I have taken up so little space because I prepare my images for the Web. which means preparing the images at a suitable size to be viewed on a computer screen.
There is no point in uploading an image bigger than the screen can display, and 200KB (kilobytes) for a detailed image 1,500 pixels on the longer side is all that is needed. Many images I upload are half that file size.
Printing Versus Computer Screens
If I take a photograph to a printer and ask them to print it full size, they would print it at 300 dots per inch. Each dot is a squirt of ink or pigment onto the paper.
When viewed from a ‘normal viewing distance’, an image printed at 300 dots per inch will look continuous to the human eye, meaning you won’t see that it is made up of individual dots. Of course if you put your eye very close up to the image you will see the dots. But close up is not what we do.
We look at a normal viewing distance.
It’s always that normal viewing distance that’s important.
If I ask the printer to make a really big print it will work. But there will come a point when the print I ask him to make will be so big and there are so few dots in a given area that the image loses definition and I will see that at the normal viewing distance.
But again, it depends on the viewing distance. If I asked the printer to print the photo ten metres wide to put on the side of a bus, he would have to print it at a much smaller number of dots per inch. But I would not look at the bus from two metres away.
I would probably see it from at least twenty metres away. And my eye would piece together the dots and I would still see the photo as a whole.
When you stand very close to a giant poster or to the side of a bus, you can see the individual dots. But from further away, your eye and brain rolls it all together sees one continuous image. Again, what looks OK depends on what is the normal viewing distance.
Computer Screens Are Different
Computer screens are different. Each model has its own native resolution or pixel density.
72 dots per inch is usually taken as a good standard. And here is the crucial difference. Unlike with printing onto paper, you can’t cram or squirt more pixels onto the screen. You may be able to lower the screen resolution in the settings, but you can’t increase the screen resolution.
The screen is built to a specification and you can’t make the pixel density higher. You can’t cram in extra pixels and you can’t make the image look denser. That means any ‘extra’ pixels are wasted. And each unneeded, extra pixel increases file size for no purpose.
That’s why the small file of just 100-200 kilobytes is enough for a large image on the Web. Any more pixels would just be wasted.
Pixels and JPEGs
A good question is why some JPEGs are bigger file sizes – more kilobytes – than other JPEGs with the same pixel measurements.
The reason has to do with the way JPEGs work, which is that the program that compresses the images works by each pixel looking at its neighbour, and if the two are the same colour then they amalgamate when they are saved and separate when they are unpacked.
Images with many colours that are not the same – think of the leaves on a tree – can’t amalgamate as much as for example an image that has a single colour occupying a chunk of the image.
