More Information

Copyright

Enjoy the photography on this website but please respect the copyright. All photography is Copyright © 1986-2005 Robert E. Barrett, All Rights Reserved. Photography may not be used for any purpose without explicit permission. Each photograph has been stamped with a faint copyright symbol to discourage unauthorized use. Additionally, the entire contents of this website including design, text, graphics, and underlying code, is Copyright © 1998-2005 Robert E. Barrett, All Rights Reserved.

About Photo Image Display Quality

Converting photos from film to computer screen with 100% accuracy is impossible. While much care has been taken in the preparation of the photographic images on this website, please understand that they are still just a crude representation of the original image. To understand why, continue reading. (You should also read the next section below, Monitor Settings for Best Photo Viewing).

Why...
The conversion of a photo from film to computer screen involves several steps, each of which degrades its quality.

1. To begin, a photograph on film is an image that can contain an almost infinite palette of colors and is very large in terms of the amount of image detail contained.
2. The first step in the conversion is to scan the film to convert it into a digital file. This significantly degrades the the photo because: 1) The tonal range of the photo -- the range of light and dark tones in the image -- is reduced, destroying detail in light and dark areas. 2) Slight color variations are introduced by the scanner. 3) During the digitization process, the image is "rasterized" or cut up into tiny squares which adds chopiness or "graininess" to the image. Furthermore, to control file size and download time, the amount of information captured from the photo is minimized by increasing the size of the raster squares, which emphasizes the graininess. 4) To further optimize download times, the information is compressed using the JPEG file format which causes still more detracting visual artifacts and color shifts.
3. Finally, the image is displayed by your browser on your computer screen and, depending on your software and hardware setup, the image quality may be further impacted. For example, if your monitor is set to display only 256 colors, more color inaccuracies are introduced. Also, a computer monitor is a raster device (it uses pixels for display) and forces yet another rasterization on any image it displays.

Monitor Settings for Best Photo Viewing

The photographs on these web pages were designed to be viewed at a screen resolution of 640x480 or higher, with best viewing at 800x600. Logically, the more colors available to the monitor display, the better the photographs will appear. A 24 bit "true color" setting (yielding 16.8 million colors) or higher is preferable. Your monitor should be properly calibrated as well (for more information, search the web for "monitor calibration"). To understand why any of this is important, please read About Photo Image Display Quality above.

Browser Issues and Cookies

This website is designed using HTML 4 (Transitional). Additionally, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are used for presentation and Javascript is used for site automation. As such, the website is targeted to the more recent browser versions such as Microsoft Internet Explorer version 4 and higher, and Netscape version 6.x and higher (note that support of Netscape 4.x was discontinued in early 2001). Other browsers, such as Opera, should also display the site properly (however, testing in Opera version 6.02 shows that it cannot perform some of the dynamic HTML techniques used, although it does well with CSS). Proper display cannot be guaranteed using older browsers. Furthermore, both Cascading Style Sheets and Javascript should be enabled in the browser for proper use of this website. In particular, navigating the site, viewing photographs, and using the Exposure Calculator all require Javascript and CSS.

A word about cookies... Cookies should also be enabled to view photographs. Please note that no permanent cookies are stored -- all cookies are deleted as soon as the browser is closed. Cookies are used only to automate site navigation and photograph viewing -- no personal information of any kind is gathered. (If contacting Robert E. Barrett using the Contact page, your name and email address are requested but no cookies are involved.)

The design of these website pages conforms to World Wide Web Consortium standards whenever possible. For more information see www.w3.org [off-site].