By the time you are reading this, my prediction is that the ground will be all white and school-aged children everywhere will be rejoicing. Of course, this being New England, it could also be sunny and 70. As long as I have my MILK AND BREAD, I’m all set. I hope. And it’s supposed to clear long enough to get more milk and bread for another potential storm on Sunday. The groundhog predicted 6 more weeks of winter. I usually prefer to get my weather information from meteorologists, but in this case, I’ll give one to the groundhog.
Photos, photos, photos… We love photos here at the Stow Independent. Love to see what Stow people are up to and where they’ve been and all those good things we love to share. Unfortunately, it’s become more commonplace for people to use their cell phones to take photos. I say “unfortunately” because those cell phone pics that look great on Facebook and when emailed to friends and relatives, most often do not look so good in print. I know a lot of cell phone cameras these days take really decent pictures, but there are a few problems that make them difficult to put in the paper. When sending from your phone, depending on how you do it, the photos are often shrunk to make them easier/quicker to send. When things are posted online through an automatic service, they are also shrunk to make web pages load more quickly. And, in general, unless you have a high quality camera in your phone, and can send the original file, it’s just not going to be high enough quality for print purposes.
We don’t want to discourage anyone from sending in photos – we really want you to – but when you do, please try to send the largest size, original file as an attachment (not embedded and not a link to an outside subscription-based photo service that I can’t access) so your photo will print well (and my computer won’t start spewing error messages because the photo quality is too low!).
You’ll see on our front page that we are starting a new system for people looking for back issues of the paper. The best thing to do, of course, is to buy extra copies at one of our retail locations before the issue is sold out or picked up for the next week. But if that doesn’t happen, issues will now be available for sale at the COA office, accessible through the lower parking lot at the rear of the Stow Town Building. All proceeds from sales will be donated to the Stow Friends of the COA. See the caption on the front page photo of the print edition for more details.
We will also soon have electonic copies of articles available for a fee. More details to follow.
Hope everyone stays safe and warm and off the roads for the storm.
Cyndy Bremer, managing editor; [email protected]