revisions

Revision History

1994:::thought about this for years (seemingly) beginning circa 1994. As this was conceived as a do-it-yourself project it languished.....
2002?
2003:::developed some templates, accumulated images for the image library from existing picture disk's, photo cd's and digging through old negatives that needed to be scanned, learned more about digital image processing etc,
02-19-04::: current version covers 1989 - February 2004. At this point most of the graphical images have been loaded and some of the editorial content has been written. Last updates posted 02/20/04.
02-20-11::: edited some of the text as an update; I have quite a few images to process and upload, as well as some undocumented projects.

page text courtesy Brian Wainwright

Notes on Software

the tools that were finally selected to create this page are Paint Shop Pro 8 (PSP 8)for image processing, Irfanview creating the thumbnails, HTML-kit was used to edit all the html and Top Style for working out the CSS.

image processing

The first decision to make was that of the photo editing software, PSP 7 was what we started with and as time passed an upgrade to ver. 8 became available and was purchased. Many days were spent creating different versions of all of the images, in the end after some research and a lot of tries we developed a system. Starting with a raw .tiff image(if available) we increased the canvas size to allow for perspective changes and rotation. We used Panorama Tools to adjust perspective and in an effort to stitch together some of the images where the lens available at the time was not wide enough. Stitching an interior view with all the lines and shadows that are present proved to be an impossibility and was aborted. When the "right" view was achieved from perspective adjustments and image rotation we cropped it down. The tools we used at this point varied from image to image as did the settings of those tools, but we limited it to a short list: auto color balance, auto contrast enhance, clarify, auto saturation, edge preserving smooth, and/or sharpen or unsharp mask. Auto settings were used at times and at others manual settings were chosen. These images were saved in an edited images folder. Next we sorted, using the ACDSee viewer, throwing out the ones we didn't like. Returning to PSP 8 we created borders then text (T Self Cabinetmakers & Furniturebuilders). The files were saved in the sort file folder. Revisiting all the images again we resized them to 800 pixels on the long side @72ppi. We then compressed and optimized for roughly a 30 second download or less with a 56k connection and saved in web selections folder.

thumbnails

We tried a lot of different things, starting with ACDSee we created all the thumbnails and html pages, as we got deeper we switched to Irfanveiw and recreated all the thumbnails and html. We tried different color borders and different size thumbnails settling on white borders which would blend with the white background when the borders were set to 0 in the html. I think the image quality of the thumbnails created with ACDSee was probably better but Irfanview handled the sizing and border issue with ease.

HTML & CSS

We started with an idea of how we wanted the pages to look and of course that changed some as we got further into the process. The index page came first and the others would be made to fit that mold. Tinkering with CSS options we ended up with a page divided into left and right percentages, one for text and the other for images. Different classes control the images, left or right, and the text. The hope was to make something that could be resized and maintain some integrity of the original. Now with a html template page in hand we worked with HTML-kit's find and replace features and sculpted the html image tags created by Irfanview into something we could use. A long process of cut and paste rendered a combination of the image tags and our template page. Many adjustments were made and some lessons were learned. For instance: don't use any % characters in the title for your style sheet, the server does not like them.

testing

We loaded the pages with several browsers, first as local files, then with Abyss Web Server. Our primary browser is Microsoft's Internet Explorer ver 6.0, with this one the pages look just like we wanted and everything works fine. Mozilla ver 1.3 for the most part follows the style sheet with the exception of the appearance of some text. Opera ver 7.03 appears to like the documents as well with only mild changes to the text Amaya ver 8.2 may be the worst thing to view this site with for reasons that are beyond my comprehension.

Notes on Photography

Photography is a journey. Over the years much has been learned, then you know there is much more to learn. I think you will see an obvious improvement in the image quality over the years, a trend that should continue. Investments in lighting have made a big difference and also introduced new challenges that are struggled with every time we set up. The first camera body was a Pentax K1000 with a 50mm 1:2 Pentax lens and a Vivitar 283 flash, a Pentax KM and KX were added later along with a variety of lenses : 28mm, 24mm Vivitar, 20mm Soligor, 19mm Vivitar, 16mm Soligor and a 14mm Sigma. Lighting includes a collection of Lowel TOTA 500W Halogen lights a couple of PhotoFlex 1000W light boxes and some silver umbrellas as well as other homemade modifiers.

page text courtesy Brian Wainwright

All content copyright Terry L Self unless otherwise attributed.