Pictures of my trip to New England, etc.
in August of 2000
Technical Details
The camera I used was an old Kodak 'Pazazz' camera, from like the early 1990's or something, which uses 110 film. I scanned in the resultant 3x4 inch prints (which, by the way, cost something outrageous like $200 to develop!) using a Hewlett Packard 4200C something-or-other flatbed scanner at my aunt's house in Sept. 2000.
I then cropped them (leaving some white edges) in Adobe Photoshop. Then, because I didn't have a CD burner or any other way to send them to myself, I uploaded them to some free Tripod web space so I could download them at home via my dial-up connection. Unfortunately, a small number of the pictures failed to upload properly, and had errors (but I included some of those anyhow).
At home, I edited some of them a bit more on the family iMac, using the very nice Macintosh program GraphicConverter. I think I may have rotated them a bit, cropped them a little bit more, and saved them with a smaller file size. I made a bunch of HTML files featuring the pictures and captions - then set it all aside for years.
In Sept. 2006, I came back to the idea of putting them up on the web. That month and the next, I sluggishly went about the process of editing the original web pages to have the Astroblahhh.Com format, and modified the captions. I also decided the pictures could use a bit of enhancement, since they were blurry and still had those white edges.
So, I proceeded to edit them all in The Gimp to make them sharper, to crop the white edges, and in many cases to adjust the brightness and contrast. So, yes, they are artificially enhanced.
But, one thing I learned from working at a small local newspaper and having to process tons of pictures so they would show up looking nice printed in the newspaper in black and white, is, that there's not really much virtue in leaving the pictures as untouched as possible just for non-artificiality's sake, since they just end up looking like crap.
So, in the spirit of Pablo Picasso's quote (paraphrased), "an artist lies to tell the truth", I have modified them. (Though, not completely in the spirit of that quote, because in some cases they're changed to the point where they actually do differ substantially from the real thing.)
But really, pictures in general are pretty darn artificial already. For instance, many people barely look like the same person from picture to picture. And, compared to reality, the quality of photographs is often poor - colors are changed or distorted, things are blurrier, or brighter, or dimmer than they really are, etc., etc.
So, the camera lies already, dammit... :-)
Most of the pictures are sharpened - very few aren't. A fair number have the brightness and contrast adjusted. I cropped the white edges, and edges of the picture with them. I didn't rotate the pictures at all, just to avoid any distortion.
The mostly untouched original pictures are also available in a zip file below.
Summary of the Trip
The trip began Saturday, August 12th and ended Sunday, August 20th (or very early on Monday, August 21st).
Technically it wasn't all in just New England, as we - my family and I - had to drive through Ohio (where we started from), Pennsylvania, and New York to get where we were going... and towards the end, we also, on impulse, went to Canada to see Niagara Falls. But, it was mostly in New England. We actually spent more time driving from place to place than actually stopping and looking at stuff.
This isn't absolutely every picture I took. Some of them weren't really good enough to include, and I didn't even scan them all. Also, I didn't really want to put ones of myself or my family in. (There weren't that many of those anyhow).
This trip was a long time ago, so accordingly I don't really remember all that much about it, and I didn't even write much down about it at the time, not even in the captions I made for these pictures just a month or so after the trip.
I recently (in 2006) added to and modified the captions from what I originally wrote in 2000 and 2001. I rushed horribly, which is a mistake for me, because my writing worsens dramatically when I rush.
Downloadable Zip Files
If you want to download all the below pictures and HTML files, you can download this: Astroblahhh-2000_08_Trip_Pics.zip (About 10 MB)
If you want have the original pictures, almost untouched since 2000 (I just resaved them in The Gimp to give them a smaller file size), and the accompanying (more recently modified) HTML files, you can download them in this zip file: Astroblahhh-2000_08_Trip_Pics-orig.zip (About 8 MB)
