The Making of This Web Site
by John Eng (
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Film photography.
Until 2001, most pictures were taken on Kodak Ektachrome 100 color slide film. A few were taken on
Kodak Kodachrome 64 and Ektachrome 200 films.
Before the China trip in 1997, I was using a Canon A1 camera with the following lenses:
50 mm f/1.8, 24 mm f/3.5, and 35-105 mm f/3.5 zoom. The China pictures
were all taken with a new Canon EOS A2 camera and a Canon 28-105 mm f/3.5-4.5 zoom lens.
The A2's autofocusing capability was a new feature which I found
indispensible for many of the China pictures. After the trip, I wrote "the EOS A2 will be my camera of
choice for future additions to these photo albums."
In the Philippines, I used a 50 mm f/1.8 lens on
the EOS A2 in low light situations and a new Sigma 70-200 mm f/2.8 lens for some of the candid shots. Digital image acquisition and processing. Images from original slides were made by scanning into Adobe Photoshop with a Polaroid SprintScan 35/LE film scanner at a resolution of 1000-1200 dots per inch. Color and contrast correction was performed using Photoshop. Photoshop was also used to reduce the number of pixels in order to fit the average computer monitor and to convert the subsequent image into JPEG format, which is required by Web browsers. JPEG compression quality was set to "high." The final size of each image was either 600 pixels wide or 450 pixels tall. Digital photography. Starting with the lower Manhattan page in 2001, some photos were taken with a Canon G1 digital camera using its "superfine" image quality setting. As with scanned slides, Photoshop was used to reduce the number of pixels in order to fit the computer monitor. Starting with the Africa pictures in 2004, most photos were taken with a Canon Digital Rebel SLR camera. The safari pictures were taken with this camera and the 70-200 mm f/2.8 lens with a 1.4X teleconverter. Starting with the Egypt trip in 2005, most pictures were taken with the Canon 17-85 mm f/4-5.6 image-stabilized lens. In 2008, maximum photo size was increased to 800 x 600 pixels because our parents had converted from telephone modems to broadband Internet connections. In 2009, we began using a new Canon 5D Mark II digital SLR camera with a Canon 24-105 mm f/4 image-stabilized lens. The Sigma 70-200 mm f/2.8 lens and 1.4X teleconverter were upgraded to ones made by Canon, which we found to have better performance for astrophotography. We also began to use Apple's Aperture software to organize, adjust, and annotate our images. This greatly reduced the tedious parts of producing new sections of the Web site. In 2010, a Canon 17-40 mm f/4 wide angle lens was added to the kit. In 2012, after our trip to China, we upgraded to a Canon 5D Mark III. It's faster frame rate and more advanced autofocusing will help us keep up with Mark's activities. In 2014, we migrated our image catalog from Apple Aperture to Adobe Lightroom because of Apple's discontinuation of Aperture. Lightroom had also surpassed Aperture's overall functionality and offered better support for RAW image processing. Web site creation. These Web pages were created on a Macintosh computer with a simple text editor, BBEdit. The photo album pages were automatically generated with program I wrote in the Perl programming language. This program allows us to change the overall appearance of the Web pages without having to edit each file individually. All files were then downloaded to a Web server running on a computer connected to the Internet. In 2016, all Web pages were updated to HTML5. The main benefit of this upgrade was elimination of video playback quirks. |
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