Camera

Recently (Summer 2004) bought a digital camera which suits me much better, it's the CANON A80. See http://www.mccormick.uk.com/towerproject for example pictures. It's a good little camera for £200.

My old Minolta 7000i, 35-80mm f4.5-5.6 lens and Sigma 80-300mm f4.5-5.6. Bought second hand about 15 years ago, my Minolta has snapped its way through around 500 rolls of film over the last 10 years and I have enough negs and prints to bring an industrial shredder to its knees. Just wading through them takes ages. Sorting one pack for scanning or not takes an hour or so - of course, my memories come back to me as I flick through them all so it takes longer.

Each scan (Umax 1200s) is adjusted in PaintShopPro by running a contrast, saturation and colour balance filter over each one prior to cropping to suit. I'm concious of the size of the print for those people who have modems and small monitors - so I sometimes reduce them again by lowering the actual size of the image. One day we'll all have broadband access and 19 inch TFT monitors and I'll wish I'd kept them at a higher resolution.

Scanning all the old archived stuff a very, very long term project - and sadly I may never finish it. A couple of years have gone by already and I still have hundreds of films to look through. Maybe next winter...

Website

Like all my sites, I always create raw HTML by hand, using HomeSite as a text editor (I like the way it colour codes the HTML in editing mode). Smaller Animals gave the planet Thumbnailer which, after spending a considerable number of evenings programing, one click and the site is created completely. For instance, see my wifes Brownie Pack in operation as an example. I recreate this site every week for her. Excellent and quite remarkable really. Best £25 I've ever spent (and I rarely buy software). PSP helped me create the logos and stuff.

Simple!