Webmaster Notes

These classmate pages are for classmates that know me which makes them a little different from my other pages that are addressed to an unknown audience, but they will also be read by many that do not known me so I often find myself torn between which audience to address and thus, how best to word things.

The Class Room Stories were written for an unknown audience and used to be elsewhere, but I considered rewording the stories when the page was relocated and became a classmates page. For example, in the first paragraph there is no need to describe myself, where I grew up or my school for classmates, but unknown visitors will still read the stories so I left them unchanged and hope everyone understands why things are worded as they are and why I may flip-flop sometimes between which audience is addressed and written for.

In regards to photography, photos, editing and why I am so slow to place photos on web pages sometimes
(Ok, most of the time) . . . . . . . .

(Note - Each photo group shows an image before and after being edited.)

Outdoor lighting can be difficult for photography and this was the case at the reunion. Clear skies left the sun very bright which provided high contrast and photos were often over-exposed in sunlit areas & under-exposed in shaded areas.

A flash can help to reduce shadow problems outdoors if distances are not too great, but the tiny flashes built into cameras are pretty useless outdoors and not much better indoors unless close to the subject.

Taking a number of shots of the same subject(s) increases the chance of getting at least one shot with good expressions which is why I took about 10 shots of Bev & Barry dancing. However they all ended up being very dark due to my camera's small flash, but 2 were simply too good of Bev & Barry to not try to salvage them. They were also the darkest ones that would be the hardest to salvage, of course, but after many attempts and several days I finally managed to get them looking half decent. Being able to salvage images like this is one of the things I like about digital photography.

Digital photography makes it much easier then it once was to manipulate photos and to be creative, and one only needs a PC, photo editing software and lots of time. A PC and photo editing software is easy to acquire, but it can take a lot of time to learn how to use the software and get good results. I am far from being good at it yet and perhaps I am simply slow, but it takes me a long time to get the results wanted. I obviously enjoy this type of activity to spend so much time at it, but much more is possible then simply correcting brightness, contrast and color.

I wanted, but never got around to taking, a photo that included all of the old Craig school so I did the next best thing and created one. A number of group photos included most of the school and I started with the one which was best of the group (Top Photo). One photo showed the entire school but feet were cut off and many of us were not paying attention and fooling around (Center Photo), but it made it possible for me to remove, resize, change geometry, align and place the school's roof from it on the school in the first photo. Four classmates in the first photo were then replaced with better images of them from other photos, a window pane was repaired in a school window and brightness, contrast and color correction was individually done on each area with different lighting. The new picture created (Bottom Photo) was then placed on the reunion page.

As you have probably guessed by now, I enjoy digital photography for what it makes possible and that my photos may not always show things exactly as they were when the photo was taken. However, while I may replace an individual's image sometimes with a better or less embarrassing one, combine several images to create a new one and/or remove trash and other unsightly distractions from photos, I have yet to go to the extreme TV, movies and magazines do where one never knows anymore if anything in an image is real or simply fabricated.

And by now you should know 'why I am so slow to place photos on web pages so there is no need to say any more.

SVS Class of '65 classmate names are all on several classmate web pages so any classmate using google and searching on their name will now get a few results at least. If one has never searched for their name on the web, they should, as it can be very interesting. Searching (today) on Marlene Brownlee found 42,400 pages with both words and searching on "Marlene Brownlee", with quotes to narrow the search to pages with both names together, found 19 pages. Marlene's first and last married names were found on 562,000 pages and the exact phrase "Marlene Powell" was found on 570 pages. Robert & Erickson appears on 3,090,000 pages and "Robert Erickson" appears on 36,400 pages. Barry & Budverson is on 3 pages and "Barry Budverson" was only found on our classmate page. None of this means very much, but it can be interesting to see how many others share the same name and who they are sometimes. And Barry B, don't feel bad that your name appears so few times as I always hate it when countless pages are found that are often hard or impossible to search through for what one is actually trying to find.

That's all - for now at least . . . . .