Image Resolution for Dummies - The Freelance Files MMCCLVII

Out of focus does not mean low-resolution

As the adage has long told us, "'Close' only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades." That's pretty much true everywhere and when it comes to imparting information, it's spot on. When you ask someone for a definition, you don't want "close": you want "correct." Although many of our nominees receive an award because their work is just plain rubbish, sometimes they get "close." Sadly, that still doesn't cut it. Such is the case of Nicolette Calhoun, who tried valiantly to transfer some technology in the OurPastimes.com post "What Is Considered a Low-Resolution Image?" Well, she got close... sort of.

Photos to Wall Art for Dummies

spliced photograph

We'd like to think that if we were to pull up Google (or Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, etc.) and search on a "how do you...?" question, we'd get useful information. Unfortunately, that's not always the case. It was even less likely in the heyday of content farms like eHow.com, where "contributors" routinely pounded out instructions for projects they had never actually attempted themselves (we think it's a sad state of affairs when the person "answering" a question knows even less than the person asking it). In our humble opinion, however, that's exactly what happens when you stumble across Chantel Alise at OurPastimes.com while looking for help on "How to Blow Up Photos for Wall Art."

SLR Cameras for Dummies

SLR viewfinder system

In the bad old days of content farms, a number of "freelancers" subscribed to lists of the most popular searches, lists that they used to guide their publishing at free-for-all sites like Squidoo or HubPages (some sites, like Helium and eHow, scraped search queries and offered "titles" to their contributors). Catalogs.com, the former WhoWhatWhenWhereWhy.com, seems to have been a free-for-all, which allowed people like George Garza to pound out rubbish like, "What is an SLR camera" (George's byline has been stripped off recently, but it's his, all right.).

Megapixels for Dummies

Megapixel comparison

In the earliest days of eHow.com, just about any bozo could hang out a shingle and declare him- or her-self (there were no them-selves in those days) an expert. A lot of the dreck pumped out by "contributors" in the early days has gone to the great electron dump in the sky, but enough of it remains that you can still get a flavor of the quality of material pumped out by anonymous hacks only interested in a few bucks. We're talking hacks like "chemist," who foisted "How to Increase Megapixels" on eHow.com back in 2009; it lives on (still) at Techwalla.com.

Film Cameras for Dummies

film vs. digital

There are some freelancers who are irritating and some who are downright abhorrent. Today's is at the abhorrent end of the scale, a freelancer who claims the name Shalini Madhav (also known as Teresa Counts, A. J. Titu, or Francis Carlson; and probably others). A staffer first found her crapalicious content at EzineArticles.com, but noticed that she(?) had crossposted it to other sites... at least a dozen of them, we think. That's bad enough in and of itself, but the content is partially questionable and partially spun. Take a gander at some of the rubbish in her "The Advantages of Film Cameras in a Digital Age."

Image File Size for Dummies

Bit depth of an image

When the Antisocial Network staff find content that seems suspicious, they'll do the research the freelancer who wrote it probably should have done (instead of pretending to do it). That way you can be confident that we at least tried to get it right...  which brings us to today's DotD nomination. If the truth be told, we were looking for something else when we ran across Stephen Lilley trying to explain something for Techwalla.com. Lilley apparently thought he was in his wheelhouse explaining "How Pixels Are Converted to Bytes"... but he wasn't.

Dumb Ideas for Freelancing Dummies

Deepwater Horizon blowout

You know about "bumper-sticker mentality," right? Solutions for complex problems so simplistic they can fit on a 3" x 12" piece of paper in 40-point type? Almost invariably wrong, except perhaps one that says, "My Labrador is Smarter than Your Honor Student"? Well, they're out there; out there everywhere. People come up with them all the time, but we found a particularly interesting set published at InfoBarrel.com by a member who calls himself Dalo. Yeah, if we were dumb enough to publish "The BP Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico,"¹ we wouldn't use our real names, either...

You'd think that after the so-called Deepwater Horizon spill had been pumping oil into the Gulf for sixty days, with wall-to-wall news coverage, Dalo would have known a little more than to offer up a couple of truly inane ideas. First up is this gem:

Photography, the Dummy Version

Clueless photographer at work

Who doesn't like to get advice from an expert? Publishing company lists are chock full of books about how to get rich, written by people who got lucky and got rich and decided to get richer by telling other people their "secrets." The annals of freelance dumbassery are even fuller... Here's a bit of advice from a self-proclaimed expert in web design (ever notice how many freelancers claim to be web designers? we have) at WritEdge.com, one Redelyn Juan, who shared her vast photographic expertise with us in "How to Get that Nice Shot."¹ Wow, thanks, Redelyn!

Just in case you missed that one, here are her tips: