All the photographs in these pages and in the photo gallery have been taken by me .Please refer to the Gallery section for a complete collection of them.
As in all things in life,simple solutions can be found for the most complicated problems,if you take the time...
I use my trusty Pentax MX2 SLR camera with a standard 50 mm lens to capture my "moments of Pleasure" and scan the still photos in a desktop scanner and use the software described below to crop and resample the scanned images into these pages. As a person who had extensively used video cameras, some of which used bulky vidicon tubes that needed vast quantities of light to CCD based video cameras that could register an image in the light of a candle, I am reluctant to switch over to digital still cameras . The pickup devices which form the heart of the cameras use evolving technology and unlike film which offers a wider dynamic range of light ,offer little scope for creative use of light. Eventually they will be able to overtake the film in versatility ,but at the moment , our "�ld" film dominates the scene for creative use of photographic equipments.
1. Corel Photo paint :ver 6.0: Although an excellent commercial package that is part of CorelDraw 6,it takes getting used to.But the main advantage is when you save files in JPEG format it offers you the choice of reducing the file size without sacrificing the quality of the image.
In case you want to reduce the loading time further ,you can try JPEG optimizer ( from www.xat.com )which offers further reduction of the file size displaying 2 versions of the file (original and the compressed, to help you make a better decision ).
2. PaintShop Pro:ver 4.14: My favourite paint program which does a lot for the almost paltry registration fees.( This is a shareware software).I am a purist in heart which means I do little or no image manipulation with my images.I create the montages, or title graphics with this software,which does not hog my system resources.
3.Animagic GIF(from http://www.rtlsoft.com/animagic): This little software can make an animated GIF out of images supplied by us.All the animated GIFs barring a few Microsoft animated icons have been created with this.Most of these shareware software are worth the registration charges and add spice to your home-brewed web pages at the lowest cost.
I admonish any one from using my Photos for their use with out my express permission.
Back to the beginning....
Software : There was a time when my harddisk crashed , I had to use RAMDISK and DOS to access my Internet a/c and prepare my homepages,laboriously coding them "by hand".I could not use spell checking and more than anything else I could not see the pages as they would appear.You could see the result even now in many of the "Recipe" section. After nearly six months, It dawned on me that I am getting to be a sadist who relishes to do things the hard way, I bought a harddisk loaded with many HTML editors. The problem was by the time I got used to a particular software ,the trial period of 30 days was over and the program aborted . To complicate matters , most of the browsers I have been using needed to be upgraded to the latest versions to be able to view DHTML, CSS and all the works.In order to run those browsers you have to upgrade the processors,motherboards, VGA cards and RAM . I wish I stayed with selling Medicine ....