Johann's Photo Albums

Table of Contents

• Photos
• How were these pages made?
• Other People's Photo Albums

Photos

I have created photo albums for a bunch of dates and events, click on the date to see the photos. The descriptions have links to various related resources such as the places where the photos were taken.

• My Gallery - assorted photos
• Google's Picasa - assorted photos
• My Gallery - assorted photos

• 2004
• 2003
• 2002
• 2001
• 2000
• 1998
• 1997

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How were these pages made?

Till mid-2008 I had been using Apple's iPhoto combined with Michael Mulligan's myPhoto which automagically makes the photos from iPhoto available online via Mac OS X's built-in web sharing. I just load the images into iPhoto and it is done, so all of the processing steps below are no longer needed, but I will keep the info here for anyone who stumbles across this web page.

The majority of the photographs on these pages were prepared with the aid of the Macintosh program GraphicConverter by Thorsten Lemke in order to balance colours, add copyright information and convert to formats. Also of use is Cameraid by Juri Munkki which does some useful processing of the digital camera images as well as downloading them from the camera, and the free PhotoPage by John A. Vink which helps makes web pages of photos.

Some of the phonographs were shot with a standard 35mm SLR and translated into computer readable format in various ways. Others were shot with a digital camera - specifically a Canon Powershot s100 Digital ELPH.

Some them were sent for processing to York Photo Labs in the USA. These folks developed and printed the film and also put most of them onto standard 3.5" floppy disks with some viewing software in their PhotoFloppy^TM format. Note that York has a tendency to ignore me when I check off Macintosh format on their order form - out of the 13 or so rolls of film that they have put onto a PhotoFloppy^TM, only about 6 have been sent to me in Mac format, all the others were in DOS/Windows format. Fortunately my Mac is smart enough to read PC disks and the Macintosh software that came on the first PhotoFloppy^TM that they sent works fine on the PC formatted files - one just needs to put it in the folder with all the image files and double click on it.

Actually, one does not even need the York software, since the Mac shareware program GraphicConverter easily converts the PhotoFloppy^TM format into whatever format you might want.

Some of the photos were put by the developer (McMaster University Media Center) into Kodak's PhotoCD format. These high-quality images were then processed to make web-ready images. I have fairly high resolution images of each of the pictures on the CD that were not used on the web due to size limitations. Similarly, some of the digital camera images have been reduced in size and quality for the web.

The rest of the photos where scanned at some time or another using standard flatbed scanners and scanning software.

In my opinion, the best images have come from the Kodak PhotoCD's - the quality of the scans, the colour balance, and the resolutions seem to be best in this format. The digital camera images are also of fairly high quality, but do not match the resolution of the largest PhotoCD image files. Unfortunately the simplicity and economy of the PhotoFloppy^TM is overshadowed by its comparative low quality. The flatbed scanner produces very good output, however it requires a lot of messing with the scanning settings and takes a lot of time.

For some of the images touch up work was done using Adobe Photoshop but few needed more than GraphicConverter could handle. Copyright notices were added, with the tools of GraphicConverter for the most part.

I have found that converting to PNG format is the best way of going about stuff. Since PNG is uses a lossless compression method and can deal with bizzillions of colours it is better for my purposes than either GIFF or JPG formats. This does end up with files of fairly large size, but when converted to JPG for upload to the WWW, they become much more reasonable.

Finally, PageSpinner from Optima Systems was used to create and edit the HTML files that make up these photo albums. I also have used PhotoPage to generate thumbnails and scale large images, then reformatted the HTML it produced using PageSpinner.

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Other People's Photo Albums

Some of my friends and associates have put together photos on the web as well:

• Erich's photos
• Geoff's photos or maybe at flickr
• Ian's photos - Ian did the photography at our wedding, though none of those shots are online.
• John's photos - John (who is my second-cousin-in-law) has an online site to buy his photos - including an extensive collection of photos he took in the music business from the 1960's onward.
• Scott and Amber's photos