Welcome to KnickerPics
Pictures displayed here were taken mostly at Knickerbiker rides and hikes in and around San Diego and Knickerbiker tours around the world.
They are displayed using various web techniques because I am still experimenting, trying to find the best way to do this. Some of the albums are located on remote sites. I had to put them where I could when I had limited space. Now I have more space and shouldn't have to park in other neighborhoods.
Others have joined the fun as well. Larry Zinn developed "The Zinns in Austria" and Sharon Goodis developed the delightful, "Santa Barbara to Solana Beach," aka SB2SB as well as Biking in Ramona.
I hope you enjoy seeing these pictures as much as I enjoyed taking them.
Please select an album from the list to the left and begin viewing. Enjoy.
16 December, 2003
In case anyone was wondering what how this was done, let me provide a brief explanation.
My favorite tools are free and actually most of the work is done with these. But lets start at the beginning.
First one has to obtain the photos. I have two digital cameras. One is the Olympus 2100 UZ. This is a wonderful camera. UZ stands for ultra zoom. This camera has a 10:1 optical zoom. This was a great feature.I say "was" because when someone stole my Camry the camera went with it. The CAmry came back but they kept the camera. I wasn't surprised. Camrys are too easy to come by. The Olympus 2100 UZ unfortunately is no longer made. I've replaced it with an Olympus 5050. this is a very nice camera too but the zoom is only 3:1. Steve's Digicams had a nice review of this camera while it was still in production. I see it is out of production too.
My other camera is a Cannon S20. It is compact and sturdy, very sturdy. I've put that to the test! So far the stainless steel body has protected the camera from all the abuse I have subjected it to. Steve had a review of this camera once but it is out of production too so the review is no longer available. Before I has a digital camera I used film. At first I scanned photos after they were developed. That was terribly tedious and with the equipment I used there was always lots of work to do in a graphic program. After one session of this I had my film digitized. First I tried Photo Floppies. Photo floppies are okay if your pictures will not be enlarged or printed. Photo CDs offer much better quality and are worth the extra money if you are going to do any more than just send pictures by email. My advice is to get a digital camera. Not only are the results better unless you have a really high end scanner but it is much cheaper. You can take pictures with abandon. When you fill up your camera memory, put it on the computer and take more pictures. When you fill up your hard drive, buy another one or put the pictures on CDs. These days a new hard drive is cheap compared to film, printing and developing all the pictures you could store on it. Of course CDs are the most inexpensive way to store your pictures. It's a good idea to put them on CDs any way. Hard drives fail and you don't want to pay the price of recovery. Believe me. I did it once. Okay, that's getting the pictures. What do you do next?
My hands down favorite graphics software is IrfanView. For what it does it can't be beat and it is free. Also, it doesn't have to be installed. You just put the files on your hard drive, or a CD or a floppy and it works. The Network Nazis have things pretty locked down where I work but I can use IrfanView. Check it out at http://www.irfanview.com/. For things that IrfanView can't handle I use PaintShop Pro. I am up to version 7, no 8 now. You can find this at http://www.jasc.com/. I've been using this since at least version 3. There is one other graphics program I use. I used to use Fireworks from Macromedia to batch resize my photos. It is expensive and I only use it for one thing but that saves me a lot of time when I put up a bunch of pictures. Most graphic programs have some form of batch processing but none have all the features of Fireworks. I use it to resize all my pictures to fit within a certain area. It resizes the pictures, appends a letter to the filename and moves the original files to a new folder. It does this quickly and while I am getting myself a cup of coffee. Now this just in: The latest version of Irfan View does that too so I don't have to use Fireworks any more.
After the photos are prepared in the graphic program, there comes the task of wrapping them in HTML. HTML is what it takes to make a web page. If you haven't seen any HTML just right click on this page and select "View Source?" All that stuff incased in <> characters is HTML. The stuff incased within the <> is called a "tag." You should see plenty of <p> tags. That tag means, start a new paragraph. HTML can be written with very simple tools, Note Pad, (not WordPad), works fine. Lot's of people started writing HTML with Note Pad. I'm not sure if anyone still does. (People still do. I recently help someone learning to write html and the text he was using had him starting out in Note Pad.) You soon grow out of it. I grew into Arachnophelia. Arachnophilia is available at http://www.arachnoid.com/arachnophilia/index.html. Poke around on this site. Paul has some interesting ideas. Starting in an editor like Arachnophelia is a good way to learn HTML. However a WYSIWYG program can be easier to use. The most available WYSIWYG program right now is Front Page. It comes from Microsoft. I've even see it recommended. Like every web product from Microsoft it uses a lot of proprietary code that doesn't work in Netscape. What isn't proprietary is pretty terrible. Close inspection will reveal lots of code that doesn't do anything. Well nothing except slow down the browser which has to interpret it. I am fortunate to be able to use a much better program, DreamWeaver. Like Fireworks, this comes from Macromedia. This is a wonderful piece of software albiet rather expensive. Fortunately Macromedia offers great academic discounts. Teaching at National University brings this within my budget.
My first big project was the pictures of the Push Bike Tour. For this I scanned the pictures, tweaked them plenty and hand coded each page. It was a LOT of work. I learned a lot but I could have learned just as much with a much smaller project. This project was done using just Paint Shop and Arachnophelia. View the Push Bike Tour.
Using what I learned on this project, I built a template set that speeded things up considerably. The template set has a hundred pages. Each page is ready to accept pictures and captions. The navigation buttons are already coded. The Big Bear and Jacumba albums were built using these templates.
Some time after this I started using IrfanView. In addition to it's graphic capabilities, IrfanView will build an HTML page of thumbnails. Surround this page of thumbnails with the right code and a full size picture will display when each thumbnail is selected. The downside of this is that the pictures are not really displayed in a page so there is no place for captions and no navigation buttons. The Seattle to Portland (after the first page) and Helmut's Birthday albums were built using IrfanView thumbnail pages.
Enter Album GV (GV for Generator Viewer) is available at http://www.xydot.com/ . The author, Renate Schaaf, says Version 1.7 will be the last free version. With Album GV one can build web pages with captions and navigation buttons. It's not perfect, there is too much screen space wasted but it sure saves time and really does quite a nice job. The Knicker New Year 2002 album was built with this tool.
Album GV 2 has now been released. This version fixed some bugs in the 1.7 version and is quite nice. It went from free to shareware too.
One last thought. Putting these albums up takes lots of web space. I highly recommend A+Net at http://www.aplus.net/. You can get 500 megs of web space with your own domain name for just $9.95 a month. You can also get 500 megs for just $6.95 without domain name. Other places charge that much for 5 to 10 megs. These prices do not include internet access.