For the Love of Avatars

I went fishing the other day and captured an image I thought was pretty cool and wanted to use as an avatar. The picture shows my friend holding a tarpon by the lower jaw with two hands. The fish had been revived and was ready for release, and just before I took the shot, the tarpon opened its mouth as wide as its face would allow. An instant later, the fish swam off.

The photo turned out better than I expected. I was all excited to change avatars, but when I did, I was greeted by a puny, barely visible portrait of a dramatic moment represented as little more than a drop of foam on the fish's chin.

Surely there must be more important things for me to worry about at the moment; but for the time being, the term thumbnail size has me wishing it meant something larger to capture the true essence of the moment.

I'm not advocating that we be allowed greater space to showcase our avatars, as that would require too great of bandwidth resources. But I wonder if others here also wish they could showcase their avatars in such a way as to make them life-size, so to speak, at least fleetingly.

If you do, then this thread might come in handy. We can use this discussion as a repository for all things small, avatar-wise, that are best seen in larger form.

I'll go first:

anis said:

for creating thumbnails, cropping the image is always helpful...

Click to expand...

I know what you mean, that it helps the picture's subject expand toward the center of the image; but once that's done and converted, the avatar still remains the same smallish size.

Earlier I was toying around with a favorite shot. After it was cropped for maximum effect, the avatar size was so minuscule that it looked more like a sardine flipping on the surface, when in fact it looked like this:

Um, I just noticed my avatar fish just got bigger.

We can close this thread now.