About us
The site was started in May 2005 to help give greater substance to, and increase interest, attendance and membership in the Club, and to encourage visits to the main National Forest Riding Club Website. (Results are still being added to the old site.)
The site combines two hobbies of the owner of the site, computing and photography.
After 2 years of helping before and after shows during 2005, the author decided to keep out of mischief during shows whilst assisting with the family horse and pony, and take more than just family pictures and make them available to members to help maintain interest in the club and its website.
The charges for the photographs sold are extremely competitive but have to cover the escalating costs of production and maintaining the ever growing website and traffic; the number and size of preview pictures is considerable. As of July 2007 there are over 29,000 images online, and separately more than 14,000 additional much larger picture files offline, used for printing the contents of the site.
Online Ordering was introduced in July 2006, after a series of requests for easier and speedier ordering than by post.
For the technically minded:
2006/7 pictures are taken with the 2005 birthday and Christmas present Olympus e-300 Digital SLR camera, normally using a Zuiko Digital f3.5‒4.5 40‒150mm zoom lens; equivalent to a 35mm film camera lens 80‒300mm.
The camera is capable of taking about two and a half full resolution
JPGpictures per second and at typical NFRC shows around 1000 pictures are taken using up to 11GB of Compact Flash memory. About half are used on the site.All pictures are printed on an archival quality Epson R800 8-ink printer. Trials have shown these to be of very much superior quality and colour to picture processing done in shops or internet priting services. From original pictures to thumbnails and previews uses new automated software and publishing to the website to viewable takes about 5‒8 hours to complete once started. Printing of the finished product uses many of the most powerful features currently available in picture processing.
A second-hand duplicate camera has recently been purchased on e-Bay for future "closer" ups using either a Zuiko Digital f3.5‒4.5 14‒45mm, Sigma Digital f4.0‒5.6 55‒200mm zoom lensor or a Zuiko Digital f4.0-5.6 70‒300mm zoom lens; equivalent to a 35mm film camera lens 140‒600mm.