most digicams have the default jpg quality set to basic or normal.
this allows more images to be stored on a certain size of card/stick whatever the cam uses.

for mini details this average quality is not good enough.
it's better to set it to fine or even high quality.

as you are usually taking pics at home/in your hobby location you don't have to worry about filesize or left storage as you can format the card as soon as pics had been transferred to your computer.

Go high all the time - it is a basic principle that you will always be able to achieve the best results with images when you have the most raw material to work with. That's why wedding photographers and portrait photographers use medium and large format cameras. The great benefit to digital is that if you don't like the result, shoot again and again until you get it right!

In our regime of mini photography, we are limited in terms of the size of images we can put up on the galleries (128Kb) and even through Imageshack (1 Mb) so most people will be cropping and resizing their pictures as a matter of normal practice. A hi-res original gives you the greatest flexibility about the decisions on cropping and scaling down to get within the file limitations and also gives you a better opportunity to try alternative downsizing strategies - there are several common compression algorithms that work in slightly different ways and can produce a range of results for the same final filesize.

I think the best advice is to try this for yourselves, using the final formats permitted on the site.

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Published ebooks:
Instrument of the Empire
A Note of Defiance
Phantom Ships, Ghost Flotilla
More to come!