Photo Galleries
We have collected many pictures over the years and we have put a LOT on the web. Luckily you can browse though as many or as few as you like. We have them organized into years and then within the years in months. If you find a typo and want to tell us about it, please see the link to our email address at the bottom of the page. If you want to find out how we built this web site then read the "Technical Details" section below.
The Photo Galleries
Our photo galleries are organized by year. Please click on the gallery you would like to visit:
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Technical Details
This site is really a custom generated site with help from some photo album generation software. I have used CSS style sheets extensively so that the site is easier to maintain.
Home Page/Blog Page
The home page and blogging software I use is WordPress with my own custom template. WordPress is very very powerful and I am sure we have just scratched the surface on all its neat features. The image loading is done by using a WordPress plug in called Lightbox.
Gallery Index Pages
These are all custom written using Dreamweaver.
Photo Album Generation
Most of the photo albums generated on this site (Post-October 2005) are generated using Adobe Lightroom with a custom template that uses SlideShowPro. Customizing the lightroom template was not that easy and I am still trying to learn XSLT, but it works! I started the customization based on the Lightroom templates that were discussed on Lightroom Journal Blog. Hopefully if I get a general purpose one working I will post it on the SlideShow Pro forum, but all 2006 and 2007 galleries were created direct from Lightroom with this template. I am still getting used to Lightroom, but version 1.1 is a huge improvement over 1.0, and there are so many neat features that I still have to explore.
Prior to October 2005, I was on a PC, and used BreezeBrowser from Breeze Systems with my own templates. If you are using BreezeBrowser and you like the templates, they can be found here. Unfortunately BreezeBrowser isn't available for the Mac and running it in Virtual PC didn't seem to work. So the quest was on to find a substitute. We initially started off with iView Media Pro with again our own custom templates, but the problem was this added a few more steps to our workflow and it is just a little too cumbersome for our needs. We started playing more and more with Apple's iPhoto 6 -- Wow, so easy to use and in integrates with the screen saver as well as our iPod. Perfect, no not quite since its web generation capabilities are not easily customizable and as our library grew, so did our iPhoto problems. For those of you in iPhoto looking for Web generation capabilities, I can recommend Galerie.
The work flow is basically to capture the photos using the camera, download them into Lightroom and then generate out the galleries.
Camera
Over the years we have gone through a lot of cameras. Each picture shows the model of the camera underneath the picture. Our latest camera is the Nikon D80 This is a fantastic camera, a little big, but the quality is so worth it. Prior to the D80 we had the D70 and before that we were using a Canon Powershot G3. This is a great camera and we still use it when we need a small camera. The G3 is good for those that want simple point-n-shoot, but want some control of the pictures. Unfortunately our G3 just died (Perhaps exposed to too much snow!) and now we use a Canon PhotoShot A620. Prior to the G3 I had a Nikon Coolpix 775. Judge for yourselves, but I found the 775 to be great in daylight, but less than stellar at night. I also have a Kodak DC280 as a spare. This is really my son's camera. I am not sure what camera you will do best with, but dpreview.com has great reviews on cameras.
If you have any questions shoot us some email (Contacts below) and we will do our best to respond.