This site should be viewed with Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 or 5 at at least 800x600 resolution. Netscape Navigator does not support all the HTML and scripting on this site.
If parts of this page look 'wrong', then you might be using a browser that doesn't
fully support HTML 4. Try the HTML 3.2 version by selecting the link
on the navigation bar at the top of the page.
With the internet we have the greatest communications revolution of the late 20th century. The web is one of the best ways (so far) to access and provide information to virtually anyone with access to a computer and some form of connection to the internet. Combine that with computer monitors able to deliver high-resolution pictures in glorious technicolor, and you have the ability to share with others your favorite pictures in all their glory. In my opinion, a photo can look better on a good monitor than as a print. As a (fairly) keen amateur photographist (as my sister says), I decided that given I could do this for free, I would. Thanks to Crosswinds it was free. In terms of time, it was far from free. It took two books from the public library, and two weekends to put this together. I wrote the whole site first in HTML 4, which is only fully supported by the latest browsers (IE4+ and Navigator 4.5+, lesser browsers will format HTML 4 as a load of gibberish), and even Navigator does not support all that is available here. I suggest IE5 as far superior product to Netscape anything, in terms of interface, HTML/scripting support, speed and everything else. Netscape may have won the first battle, but Microsoft has won the war.
The "raison d'etre" of the site: I simply enjoy taking and looking at photos, and would like to share mine. Now anyone with a connection to the internet can view my best pics with only a little movement of their right index finger.
If you are looking for photo info/resources on the internet, then this is NOT the place to be, and the best place for you to go is photo.net, a damn fine website developed by some bright spark at MIT who is a keen photographer. I have read through huge amounts of this site, it is littered with information/tips/reviews/ideas on virtually anything to do with photography, and I've probably only seen a quarter of what's available on the site. Particularly useful have been photo.net's film guides, camera/lens reviews, and certain special techniques, e.g. pinhole photography, star-trail/comet photography.
Each small JPEG image below leads to a higher resolution JPEG
image, where you will find some technical details, and possibly a
number of links to the same image at various resolutions.
You can choose to view images at 768x512 or 1536x1024 (for those
with fancy 1600x1200-plus displays) by selecting the appropriate link
on the navigation bar at the top of the page. I use JPEGs because
they compress seriously the size of graphics
files, whilst not doing too much damage to the image (although
the compression is definitely NOT lossless), which means I can do
this for free, not having to pay for hundreds of megabytes of
disk storage, and also the download times are fairly short. Also
(as the images are not perfect) it means that if anyone wants to
use my photos commercially, they will have to obtain a license
from me if they want a higher quality image of any of these
photos. Anyone not doing this BEWARE. I own the copyright to ALL
these images. Don't even THINK about pilfering them without a
license.
This is just a selection of all the photos I have taken since
about mid-1997. Virtually all were taken on 35mm slides from
either Kodak or Fuji. My photos
of Hale-Bopp were taken on Konica VX400 negative film, more due to the
fact that I obtained some of this film for free than due to any
special qualities it might have. Indeed, it was seeing and
photographing this comet that got me interested in photography.
Most photos were taken with Canon EOS gear, although again the
comet is an exception and was taken with Olympus OM equipment.
See individual images for more details. All were scanned by Kodak
and put onto PhotoCD. This gives you 3072x2048 images at about
36Mb each (compare to 60Kb-200Kb on this site). From PhotoCD to your monitor they have been
re-sized and compressed using JASC's Paint Shop Pro, although I'm going to
try and use Adobe's Photoshop
eventually, which is a far better product.
For most images I have used some digital jiggery-pokery but only
to make the image you see on your monitor as similar as possible
to the original scene. This was done on a one-by-one basis from
my monitor at home, and involved changing either
brightness/contrast (usually a tad more of each) or
hue/saturation/luminance (generally just a little more saturation).
Making them like the original scene was based on a
purely objective view on my part, and the quality of the image
you see will also depend on the gamma and brightness/contrast settings
of your monitor. I am not 100% satisfied with the modifications possible
with Paint Shop Pro, I hope Photoshop will do better. I haven't done any
cropping either and some horizons are not quite horizontal (as well as
there being some annoying plane trails, some lens flare etc.). I'll do it
for next time.
The original slides still look much much better.
I welcome any comments on the photos, page layout, site design etc.
I'll change it all completely in a little while anyway (hopefully
in a month or so). This is the
first set of pages I've ever put together so I'm not 100% satisfied
yet. I already have a few ideas on how to make it more user-friendly.
