This site is dedicated to digital imaging as a hobby. You may use any of the images, ideas, or code provided you cite dslide.com as the source. My goal is to improve my own photography and digital processing and sharing of photographs, and to provide ideas and techniques useful to others who have similar goals and who can provide feedback and ideas of their own. All of the images on this site are my own, except where another source is cited. You will find, on the contents page for each carousel, a description of any special effects used.

Many excellent photo viewer programs and services are available on the Web. I developed the dslide "projectors" with these objectives:

1. They display the largest images you can fit on your display, up to 1280 * 1024. (I grow tired of the dinky images used in most Web sites and online photo services.)
2. They can display just about any set of images. Each digital carousel is a folder containing .jpg files and a single text file containing names, titles, and descriptions.
3. All you need is your browser. No installation or download required.
4. They work well on CD, which is especially nice for users without broad-band Internet connections (and photo enthusiasts with lots of images but not enough Web server space).
5. They are safe to use. They are written in Javascript, which does not allow data to be written to your computer. Moreover, the CD and the Web site have been checked for viruses using Norton Antivirus with the latest available virus definitions.
6. You can use them in your own photo Web site or CD, as long as you cite dslide.com as the source.

System recommendations:

1. A recent version of one of the major Web browsers. The scripts are written to support some older browsers such as Netscape 4, but more recent versions such as Netscape 7 and Internet Explorer 6 are more standards-based and work much better.
2. A reasonably fast processor. Pentium 200+ Mhz or equivalent recommended.
3. A recent vintage video card with at least 2mb memory. Ideal setting is 32-bit color at 1024x768 or larger.
4. For the CD, a recent vintage CD-ROM drive.
5. For the Web site, a broad-band connection such as Cable or DSL.

In the days of AM radio and drive-in theaters, home slide shows were quite popular. They weren't quite as popular as Super 8 home movies, but the image quality was a whole lot better since the film was 19 times larger. Over the years, quality gave way to convenience as the consumer technology industry brought us the Polaroid camera, the one hour print processing shop, the camcorder, and the disposable camera. I always preferred shooting transparencies because I can view them large-as-life on the screen and also get good prints of those worth printing. Funny thing about giving slide shows, though. While folks always seemed to enjoy them, persuading them to go upstairs and sit in front of the screen was like trying to organize a pep rally amongst a herd of cud-chewing dairy cows. I could almost hear them thinking "Oh no! Not one of those boring old-fashioned slide shows!"

At the tail end of the second millenium, high quality digital imaging became affordable to home consumers. It's all a matter of bandwidth. A quality digital photo is just like a quality digital sound recording: you need a lot of samples (around 40,000 per square inch for a photo and 40,000 per second for music), and you need enough bits per sample to capture dynamic range (8 or more bits per channel to capture the audible frequency spectrum of music, and 8 or more bits per color to capture the visible frequency spectrum in photography). Some purists argue that analog is better. We know from the calculus, however, that as the sampling rate increases, the difference between analog and digital vanishes. Audio purists still listen to a few analog recordings, but not many. Most professional photographers not yet using digital cameras say they are waiting for more bandwidth. If you have a recent model home computer and a good size monitor, configured to display "true color", you already have a great display device. If you use a dialup modem, you will lose patience trying to view full size pictures from the Internet. But a recent vintage CD-Rom drive will serve up those big pix handily.

So what about Kodachrome, Ektachrome, Fujichrome, and all their chrome buddies sleeping in that old Carousel farm in the closet? Five or ten percent are good enough to be reincarnated as virtual slides. By this I mean simply digital images prepared for computerized display or printing at the optimal size, resolution, and (I hope) quality. Negative film can be just as easily transformed into virtual slides. And with the digital camera, new images spring forth without film. Some are destined for the big bit bucket in the sky, while others land on a CD as virtual slides with aspirations of being widely circulated. Yes, this stuff's all amature, and I'm just getting started, but I get a kick out of it. Maybe you'll enjoy viewing my virtual slides. But you can also set up the virtual slide theater with your own pictures.

I am grateful to my dad for teaching me how to take good photographs with a 1951 Leica IIIf camera, 50mm Summitar lens, and hand held exposure meter when I was twelve. I was still using this camera when I got turned onto wilderness photography during college. During the past six years I've had rather different photo opportunities as the father of twin boys.

Color depth

Set your video driver to display the largest possible number of colors. If you use one of the Microsoft Windows operating systems, open the Display Properties dialog,which can be accessed by right-mouse button click on the desktop background, choosing Properties from the popup menu. Click the Settings tab, then select the highest available color depth, e.g., "True Color (32 bit)", in the Colors selector.

Screen area

Set your video driver to display the largest number of pixels available at the maximum color depth setting, or the largest that you are comfortable with. Dslide.com images display best at a screen area of 1024 x 768 or 1280 x 1024. Windows operating systems provide a Screen Area selector in the same dialog as the color depth. If your color depth setting changes when you increase screen area, you'll know you don't have enough video memory for this setting. In this case, decrease the screen area so you can maintain maximum color.

Window size

Dslide.com is designed to open images in full-screen windows with almost the entire window available to the images and without scroll bars. You can also do this manually by maximizing the window and closing any extra windows or tool bars which waste screen real estate. Internet Explorer provides a function key, F11, for turning full screen mode on and off.
 

Monitor brightness and contrast

Set your monitor's contrast control to maximum, then adjust the brightness so you can see at least the first 12 steps (white to 95% black) in the set of gray bars in this image. The distinction between 95% and 100% should just be barely visible.

Monitor white point

Many monitors provide color settings within a menu that you set using buttons on the monitor. Some provide a "white point" setting, which is the color temperature to be defined as white. The highest setting is typically 9300°K, which makes the image look too blue, like a cool-white florescent lamp. The lowest setting is typically 5000°K, which makes the image look too yellow. The recommended setting for Windows operating systems is 6500°K.

Monitor RGB

Some monitors let you control the intensity of red, green, and blue separately. You can take advantage of this if you have access to a monitor calibration device. I use the Monitor Spyder from ColorVision. This relatively inexpensive device measures actual R, G, and B output, letting you adjust the settings until they are equal. This helps eliminate color casts by making grays and whites as neutral as possible.

Device profiles

The points above can all be used to improve photo viewing using your Web browser. You can do even better if you have an International Color Consortium (ICC) device profile for your monitor and use ICC-aware photo viewing software. These profiles are provided by monitor and operating system vendors for common types of monitors. You can make your own subjective profile (your eyes do the measuring) using Adobe's Gamma utility, or you can make your own objective profile (a device does the measuring) using software such as Colorvision's Photocal. See the Imaging Resources page for more on this topic.

To get a decent print of a photo, you need a much larger image than typically found on the Web. Computer images are actually mosaics, where each tile is called a pixel and is a teensy square of a single color. To see a good image on your monitor, you need about 72 pixels/inch--a mosaic whose tiles are 1/72 inch wide. For a good print, on the other hand, you need at least 200 pixels per inch, depending on the printer (300 is even better). The images you see here are 200 pixels/inch so you can print them. If you're using the CD, print the largest images (they have file names ending in A.jpg). They are around 1240 x 850 pixels, which prints out at 4.25 by 6.25 inches. Larger images are needed for large prints. The Polaroid scanner creates images up to 3300 x 5000 pixels (16.5 x 25 inches). The Nikon Coolpix 995 digital camera creates images up to 1536 x 2048 pixels (7.7 x 10.25 inches), and the D100 does up to 2000 x 3008 (10 x 15 inches)

The trickiest thing about printing is getting the color right. There is a scientific way to do it, if you want to open a can of worms. Otherwise, it's basically trial and error. The printer itself determines how smooth and realistic the photograph will be. The smaller the dots produced by the printer are, and the more colors are available for each dot, the better. The quality of the paper is also important. But the correctness of the color is controlled by software. The print driver software usually pops up a window in which you can adjust brightness, saturation, and hue.

A great alternative to printing your own photos is to send the images you want printed to a photo printer, either local (many photo processing stores can do this) or on the Web (ezprints.com and many others). You can either upload the images or deliver them on CD.