Technical Information
All the photos on this site, and the site itself, were made by Tom Roelandts. The older series (China, the United States and the United Kingdom) with a Nikon Coolpix 950 digital camera. The photos from the Italy series were made with a Nikon D70 digital camera and a Nikkor 18-70 mm f/3.5-4.5 lens. The Portugal series was made with the same camera, but with a Nikkor 18-200 mm f/3.5-5.6 lens. The Miscellaneous series was assembled over the years, so it contains photos that were made with each of the mentioned cameras and lenses. Any editing of the photos was done with GIMP [gimp.org].
The pinhole photos were made with the same Nikon D70, but with no lens at all. Instead, I taped a very thin sheet of metal with a 0.3 mm (why 0.3 mm?) circular hole (the pinhole) to a body cap with a larger hole in it. The distance that the outside of a body cap happens to be from the sensor, makes this equivalent to a 49 mm f/163 lens (why f/163?). Note that f/163 is about 8 stops slower than your typical f/10 aperture (why 8 stops?). This lengthens an, also typical, 1/250 s exposure to a full second. I used a tripod!
The site itself was written directly in HTML, using the vim [vim.org] editor and a php [php.net] script that generates the pages with the photos (which saves me a lot of work and guarantees that there will never be a wrong link on those pages). The convert tool from ImageMagick [imagemagick.org] was used to resize the photos for the web. Some JavaScript is used, but no functionality is lost (for example, the comment form is simply always shown) when it is not available or disabled. All pages are valid XHTML 1.0 Strict.
A lot of care was taken to adhere to the HTML and CSS standards. If you use a standards compliant browser, the site should render exactly as intended. Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 has always been supported, too. However, since the addition of the pinhole page, I stopped working around the quirks and shortcomings of that browser. The main effect of that is that the Pinhole Photography graphic on the main page is shown with a grey background, since Explorer 6 doesn't support transparent PNG images. If you use an older version of Internet Explorer, and you have problems viewing the site, please upgrade to a standards compliant browser (Firefox [getfirefox.com] is a good candidate) or to Internet Explorer version 7 or later.
-- Site History -- v3.1, December 2009 - Added the Portugal series. - 50% bigger photos. Because, to quote CP, we like you so sympathy! - Dropped the .html extension from the URLs. v3.0, August 2009 - Added the Pinhole series. - Added the Details page to Technical Information. - Dropped support for Internet Explorer 6. v2.2, August 2008 - Added two photos to the Miscellaneous series. - Added the spam avoidance measure to the comment form. v2.1, March 2008 - Added three photos to the Miscellaneous series. - Added the background image. v2.0, November 2007 - Completely reworked the layout. - Added the comment form. - Replaced one photo in the Miscellaneous series. - Made the site more search engine friendly. v1.5, December 2006 - Added the Italy series. - Reworked the HTML and CSS code. v1.4, May 2006 - Added copyright notice to photos. v1.3, February 2006 - Added two photos to the Miscellaneous series. - Changed the character encoding from US-ASCII to UTF-8. v1.2, October 2005 - Added the thumbnail page. v1.1, August 2005 - Changed the source language from HTML 4.01 Transitional to XHTML 1.0 Strict. - Changed the generation scripting language from tcl to php. v1.0, January 2004 - Initial version of the complete site. ------------------