Technical Information
I freely admit to being a high tech geekette. I even built my own computer (an Athlon XP, DDR memory, RAID 1 drives, USB 2.0, Windows XP Pro, etc., you get the idea). But the fact that you're reading this says something similar about you.How I Construct These Pages
I don't use any web authoring tools which is why you don't see any fancy effects. I write almost all of the HTML myself with an ASCII text editor. What HTML I don't write is generated by Perl scripts I've created to give every page the same look.
My Digital Cameras
Almost all of my pictures were taken with a digital camera. Until April 2001, I used a Kodak DC120, one of the first consumer grade 1 megapixel cameras. It's a bulky camera, about the size of a modern compact camcorder.Since April 2001, I've been using a Nikon Coolpix 880 digital camera. It's much smaller, has higher resolution (3 megapixels) and has better controls than my old Kodak. But it has one major flaw. The built-in flash is woefully underpowered and it has no capability to add an external flash.
Lighting Tips for Digital Cameras
Before the age of personal computers, I was an avid amateur photographer. Back then, I learned about using slave flashes (no, it's not one of those BDSM things) triggered by the light of a master flash. I could use the flash of the digital camera to fire a more powerful flash unit I already owned. Better yet, I could bounce the light of the more powerful flash off the ceiling while the flash on the camera would be a fill-in flash. This would give my photos more even lighting. All I needed was slave flash trigger attached to the external flash unit.Well, it turns out conventional slave triggers don't work with most digital cameras because the camera flash fires twice. On the first firing, the camera takes a sample of the scene and adjusts itself before taking the picture on the second firing. Unfortunately, by the time the camera takes the picture, the slave trigger has already set off the other flash unit. The solution came in the form of a slave trigger from SR Electronics that fires on the second burst of light it sees.
Photo Retouching
What you see is pretty much what you get in person but I must admit, the camera seems to make me look younger. I do a little touching up with Adobe Photoshop Elements or, previously, Ulead PhotoImpact. The touching up is mostly to correct exposure levels and reduce harsh shadows and glare. With my new camera and flash setup, the need for corrections has gone way down. I also use these graphic tools to add my copyright notices (I've had my pictures "stolen" by commercial websites in the past) and to control the JPEG quality.