(for you paparazzi e cognoscenti: Fuji film in a Contax with Zeiss lenses, megapixel Olympus, 96dpi, PhotoDeluxe)

For the last several years I have shot both digital and 35mm film, almost equally. That is, if I shoot with one camera, I usually duplicate the same or similar shot with the other camera.

For film, I start with Fuji 100ISO, or sometimes a higher Fuji speed, depending on the situation. Then I order commercially-developed, 4"x6" glossy prints from any trustworthy grocery store. I scan those pictures with an HP Scanjet 3670 flatbed scanner, which is just adequate for my needs. Incidentally, this scanner is even harder to keep lint- and dust-free than my past flatbed scanners. I've had to rescan perhaps one out of six of my film shots after I notice contamination on the screen while editing.

For both film and digital shots, Adobe PhotoDeluxe Home Edition 4.0.1. is my humble choice for trimming and converting the images. In the case of film, once I'm on a roll (heh, heh), each preselected photo takes about a minute and a half to scan into PhotoDeluxe. For digital shots, I connect the camera directly to the computer via USB cable. Windows XP automatically recognizes the camera and pops up a simple menu to transfer the images onto the hard drive.

PhotoDeluxe then makes it easy to save each photo in two formats. Full-resolution TIFF format is my choice for preservation, and eventually I'll print a few TIFF images. For website display and emailing, I choose 96dpi JPEGs. There aren't many monitors that can take advantage of higher resolutions. Thumbnails come from the JPEGs. The absolutely free program Easy Thumbnails by Fookes is absolutely the best photographic software in the history of the Internet, because it's so simple to use perfectly. And it's free.

Overall, this combination works fine for me, especially since my simple needs of scanning, sizing, and saving don't require PhotoShop with its attendant learning curve. Operationally, I don't care for the slow initialization of the scanner through WinXP over USB1.1. However, I was pleasantly surprised at WinXP's ease of OCR scanning and conversion. WinXP provides a system-default OCR capability that's quicker to save in Word than other OCR software.

This site's older photographs are in a variety of resolutions, but usually don't exist in any other than JPEG format after repeated re-sizing. Please appreciate them.