Troubleshooting Photos –
About Prints On This Site
This is not an invitation to buy prints from this site. Rather it's an explanation of a minor technical problem.
Many of the pictures on this site are presented as comparison-pairs – one appears immediately and another version of the same image appears when you roll your mouse over a button. Some of these are purely digital files, while others have been printed, then scanned to show a printer effect.
When you activate a rollover of one of these printed files, you may not always see a smooth transition and parts of the image may appear to jump a few pixels one way or another. This is not due to an unwillingness to spend a few seconds lining up each pixel, but the impossibility of doing so.
Even a reasonably good photo printer, like the one used to print the pictures used on this site, is somewhat less than pixel-perfect in handling paper. Therefore, there will be slight differences between the prints.
The printer used to print the photos on this site is fairly accurate, but it's not perfect. Note the way that the pillars appear to move upward when you roll your cursor over the buttons to show the correct version. The current printer could be replaced with some tremendously sophisticated machine, but that would miss the point of doing everything on this site with tools that interested – but essentially casual – photographers are likely to use.
This of course provokes the question – what tools have been used? We're not saying. A lot of the gear used here is over six weeks old, so in technology-years, it's obsolete. In addition, we admire the stance of Julia Child, who used to disguise her kitchen gizmos' brand names on her PBS show, believing that the tool is less important than the hand that guides it.
Incidentally and to explain the disclaimer above, no claim is made for the artistic excellence of the photos on this site, so prints are not for sale. These photos show places that people have been and sights they thought were worth remembering. Beyond that, they were chosen for their ability to illustrate a problem and a solution. Why are there so many pictures of flowers? Simple – they're useful for illustrating problems. They're attractive and colorful, they've got edges and gradients of color as well as complex detail, they don't move while you take multiple photos of them and they don't complain if you show their bad side on the Web.
