JPEG Wars

As many of you may have noticed, we are adding a new event to Woodworking in America this year. It’s called “JPEG Wars” and it will follow the “How to Save Woodworking – Five Views” talk at the Hofbrauhaus on Friday night. Images are already starting to pour in, so I want to give everyone some guidelines for submitting images.

The event was inspired by the “Slide Wars” event that was so popular at the Furniture Society annual conference. As was the custom with that event, with beer in hand, we are going to project images of the work of WIA attendees up on a giant screen and let the crowd offer praise, criticism, cheers or jeers. It’s your chance to see (anonymously) how your work stacks up against that of other woodworkers.

Please submit (3) digital photos of  your best work in the next months (five submitters will be randomly selected to receive a $100 gift certificate to ShopWoodworking.com). Then we’ll project all the images we receive up on a giant screen (no names will be used), and we’ll ask for lightning-paced feedback from the crowd. We’ll even have a design guru on hand who will declare one design as the winner of the entire night – and that woodworker will receive a very special high-end hand tool.

I’m going to put all the images into a PowerPoint presentation on my laptop. The easiest way to format your images is to open them in a software such as Adobe’s PhotoShop. On the top toolbar, click on Image, then Image Size.  For horizontal images, under Document Size, type in 10″ as the width, with inches as the unit. Then add 100 as the Resolution, with pixels as the unit. Also, make sure the “Constrained Proportions” box is clicked. For vertical images, everything is the same, with the resolution at 100 again, but change the height to 7.5″. Please send you best three JPEG images as an attachment to my e-mail address.

You can also size images in a number of free programs.

–Ajax Alexandre

If you are looking for inspiration for your next project, we have a great book, “Studio Furniture of the Renwick Gallery: Smithsonian American Art Museum,” currently on sale at ShopWoodworking.com.