How I did this

My camera: A Nikon 8008 with a data back. The camera works great. The meter works very well for the strangely lit situations I often give it (but I'm using print film). I tend to manually focus because the autofocus is not so good.

My previous camera: A Minolta X-700. My new camera is better but I saw one of these the other day and got a little misty.

My main lens: a beautiful 60mm macro Nikkor.

My film: 400 speed Fuji most of the time. 400 speed Kodak the other.

Digital video: For a while I had a JVC-dv1 (which I traded for the Nikon). This piece of technology shot amazing video but I think I'm more of a still picture kind of guy.

Computer:  A custom built Pentium II-350 with 96 megs of ram running win 98.

My graphics software: Poser- a Metacreations program for positioning people.
                                     PhotoShop: Without PhotoShop I would not have bought a computer.
                                    Thumbs Plus: This is a thumbnail viewer with a number of great features.

How I created this site and some notes on scanning:

  My method for creating this site I consider cheap and ugly. If I had done it right I would have had all my negatives scanned to photo CD. (To do it right check out what Philip Greenspun has to say at photo.net.). Instead I have scanned things by hand which is cheap but had problems.

Scanning Part I: My first scanner was an AcerScan 310s ($70) it worked well but slowly for two days of scanning. Then I left it alone for 2 weeks and the scanner never started again. I have yet to send the sucker back. Eventually I got an ...

Scanning Part II:  HP 6200 scanner (about $400) which was fast but had big problems:
1. Dust- but this is curable with some software filters.
2. Patches of light in the dark sections of photos. Nothing I did seemed to fix this problem.
3. It would not allow me to save and insist that the hard drive was full when it wasn't.
4. The computer would often be unable to detect the scanner. I found a cure for this was to unplug the scanner and plug it back in again.

I downloaded some software updates but no luck. So I called HP tech support about problems 3 and 2. They said problem 3 was a problem with the hard drive (windows was unable to detect any errors) and that they had never heard of the streaking problems that I was having and that I should use Windex.

So I find a workaround for the saving problem and use the Windex. Things got much worse. So I checked the HP website again which said never use a cleaner  with isopropyl alcahol. So  I check my Windex bottle- no listing of ingredients.  No ingredients on their website either. Finally an email from the company confirms this. By this point I was fed up with the whole thing and returned it to best buy and got ...

Scanning Part III: ... a Microtek V6 USL scanner ($200) which has worked much better at half the price. Its scans look much better and I have found that I can skip the preview stage but its manuals are poor. The Microtek website is also somewhat poor and does not even list my scanner as a product.

None of the scanners seem to be able to rotate a selection area for a photo that is not put in squarely.

After I was done scanning I had to make the images small and create thumbnails. Thumbs Plus's wizards were a lifesaver in taking batches of images and putting them on web pages.