I was wondering why your pens always have so many flaws. KIDDING!!!
I wouldn't have noticed the issues with the picture hosting, but your black circles in the first post do point them out well.
At the end of the day, It seems to me (read: personal opinion!) that to for the purposes of of sharing our pen designs with each other - not potential customers - it doesn't matter very much.
Your pens look great. Your photos are excellent - even with the flaws that show up in the transfer, they are better than many others posted her including all of mine.
If there would be a simple change to make that would remedy the 'problem' it would make sense to do it, but...
One of the reasons that I do like to post is to help inspire others to do better quality work. We all see and share stories of low quality things all day and it seems to be more of the norm than not and I hope that they do things like that.
As for flaws, everything has flaws. Personally I like to show them as that is one of the ways to inspire better work, more solutions and new techniques.
In the grand scheme of things for the most part it really does not matter much. However some areas, i.e. product compare, blanks, methods, results and the like is where things really pick up greatly.
OK, Ed. Just because I'm a good sport, I've temporarily raised the file size to 1 meg and increased the maximum dimensions to 960px in both directions.
EDIT: However, I have to say that I can't see any difference between those photos. Perhaps I don't know where/how to look, or I need glasses or a better monitor.
That to is what the big topic is with me. The #1 thing that everyone has said they have to zoom in some to see the image better so instead of say 800x600 perhaps 1024x768 maybe or something like that perhaps. The 1 meg is likely to large. The largest I can come up with at 960x is bit shy of 500k
Some of the details are lost if you will be I think that is more from the size. The reason many sites have lower resolutions, file size limits and the like is to keep the server from being junked up with junk.
This is what I was initially thing of may be some type of subscription service like the classified section is setup, $x per post or something like that. That would help with storage/bandwidth and what not. After all photo's like this does have serious marketing potential with it.
What we did:
I took the master image in RAW format at 240 PPI (pixels per inch)
Then I did my tweaking of whatever; in my case we did clarity and contrast, some ever so slight level adjustments, EXIF info like copyright information, author, remove some dust and spots in the background areas.
Then since the original was in 240 PPI resize the image to 800, then export to web and tinker with things until the size criteria was met.
---
These shots are 960x and under 1 meg each. They are also done in jpg mode and not raw mode.
As for the 'better blanks' goes. I would have to say proof is in the pudding. Show me, lead by example. Point me in the direction as I am starving for eye candy and am always looking for things to put under my camera lens.