Images

    All the images displayed on CapturingTime.com, are displayed as closely as possible to the original slide.  Monitor and color settings, screen resolution and the scanning source all play a significant role in how images are displayed on any website.  The only digital manipulation of these images include, brightness/contrast, color correction, sharpness and in some cases cropping (cropping vertical image for a horizontal wallpaper for example.)  Through file compression in photo editing software, file size is reduced in order to allow for faster upload times.  This may, and in fact, reduces the quality of the image on screen.  One must weigh the quality of the image versus reasonable load times.

    The scanning of images to be presented on this website came from different sources.  The bulk of the 35mm images were scanned using the Konica/Minolta DiMage Scan Elite 5400II.  Some were professionally scanned and stored on a Kodak ProCD, some 35mm scanned on a Nikon CoolScan. The majority of 4x5 images were scanned with a UMAX Astra 4450 Flatbed Scanner with transparency adapter.  Scanned images were originally loaded into ULEAD's Photo Impact 7.0 for web preparation.  In January 2006 Lon recently refreshed ALL images using PhotoShop 7.0.  There are many photo editing software packages avalaible for free or very little cost to make images ready for the web.  You don't need to spend the money on PhotoShop if your intent is putting images on the web.  However, PhotoShop has many features and tools if you're intent is to make high quality prints.  

Web Design

    This website was designed with both the user and author in mind.  With a simple layout and easy navigation, the user can easily view Lon's images - which is the primary purpose of this site.  The image galleries at CapturingTime.com are driven by a Microsoft Access database.  The huge advantage of using a database driven site is the ability to dynamically add new images or modify information about an image already in the database.  Without using a database to store information about each image, there would have to be an individual html file for every image.  And with a site with over 400 images on display, maintaining this site would be a chore.  The number of html files (actually ASP) used to display the various galleries, favorites, featured, subject and location is actually only 9 files.  This is a tremendous advantage when updates or changes need to made to the site.  The database itself does not contain the actual image files, but rather links to where those images are located on the server.

    All the code, with the exception of the navigation menu and a couple of the java scripts, was manually created with an html editor tool called 1st Page from Eversoft - which is free.  Nothing special about this editor as there are many, many editors to generate web files.  You may notice that all the pages have the .asp extension instead of the standard htm or html extension.  ASP or Active Server Page also allow web designers to have dynamic content in their pages, combine or include multiple files from the web server.  For example, the header graphic is the same code for every page on this site.  Rather than write this code on every page, you simply reference an .asp file that has the code.  The advantage here is that if the title graphic is changed, then only 1 single file needs to be updated.  This makes maintaining a website much easier and more efficient.

    Lon would like to give a big thanks to Pascal Burel of France who provided technical help with the design and troubleshooting of the database paging feature of CapturingTime.com.  You can checkout Pascal's "KlicKlac Studio" at www.klicklac.com.  Thanks Pascal!

Browsers and Monitors

    This site was built and tested using MS Internet Explorer version 5.5.  The pages have been tested using both Windows'98 and Windows 2000.  The monitor settings are 1024x768 with TruColor (24bit and 32bit tested.)  Care was taken to consider other screen sizes, but not to the point where these pages check your browser or monitor and adjust the pages dynamically.

    This site has been testing using the following browsers: Internet Explorer IE5.5+, Netscape 7.0 and Mozilla 1.2.1.  If you have any feedback or would like to report broken links or compatibility issues, please send Lon an email at webmaster@capturingtime.com

Resources/Acknowledgements

    Lon would like to acknowledge the various resources that were used in the design and construction of CapturingTime.com.  

    The main left-hand navigation menu was created with a Shareware tool called "SoThink DHTMLMenu" by SourceTec Software.  For a reasonable registration fee of $25 you get access to all the features.  The trial version does not allow actual hyperlinks in the menu, but certainly allows you to build and test your menus.  This menu creation tool is intuitive and easy to integrate into your website.

    Last, but not least, we must acknowledge the web hosting service.  There are many hundreds, if not thousands of web hosting services and companies.  We settled on ReadyHosting.com for their simple, reasonable hosting plan, features and total web space of 500mb and unlimited traffic.  At $99 per year, this was a nice choice for a photography website.  To date, there have been no issues with the company or their service.

Thank You for visiting - Enjoy your visit!