8 March 2010
-
Added a large panorama of a BMW showroom:
8 March 2010
- Added a large panorama of a BMW showroom:
6 March 2010
- The PayPal integration has been improved to incorporate a shopping trolley.
4 March 2010
- Added two pictures of Fulmars to the Wildlife Gallery,
and an extreme-wide-angle picture of the Tyne, taken on the Millennium Bridge.
3 March 2010
- Updated the gallery design tutorial and corrected two errors, so it should now make more sense.
- Added two pictures from Angkor Wat, a high-resolution panorama, and a view through an archway.
28 February 2010
- Added two B&W photos of Tojeiro-Buicks at Ouston in 1963, one of which was driven by Jackie Stewart.
26 February 2010
- I have written a tutorial showing details of how my fast, floating, auto-scaling, resolution-independent thumbnail galleries are made. No scrolling required, ever!
23 February 2010
- Replaced a Millennium Bridge panorama with one of the Houses of Parliament, made from eight exposures with a compact camera. There is still a version of the deleted picture in the Zoomable Gallery.
3 February 2010
- All Gallery pages now have the new liquid layout with scalable thumbnails. Half of the previous number of picture files are needed. Galleries now download faster, and fit any screen resolution without scrolling. Most of the motor racing thumbnails are now much smaller than before.
30 January 2010
- A new Gallery page layout uses larger thumbnails, without pop-up previews, and halves of the number of picture files used. Page load times have fallen by around 40% (cache empty).
- The new layout is "liquid": thumbnail pictures occupy a fixed percentage of the window height, and scale and so that they are all are visible without scrolling, at any screen resolution or window size. The layout has been tested with screen sizes between the lowest resolution used by any visitor to the site (1024 x 768) and the commonest (1920 x 1200), and eliminates scrolling unless a window is made very narrow and very tall.
26-27 January 2010
- Two new QTVRs, one from the summit of Mount William, the highest peak in the Grampian Mountain Range, Australia, and one of the tourist hordes who congregate to eat and drink and watch the sun setting at Uluru.
20 January 2010
- A new view on a freezing late afternoon from the High Level bridge between Newcastle and Gateshead (in both the Panoramas and the Northumbria Galleries).
17 January 2010
- Some thumbnails and pop-ups are smaller and load faster. The Contents Page should be a little easier to navigate.
15 January 2010
14 January 2010
- Assembled a new Northumbrian Gallery, including panoramas, QuickTime Virtual Reality tours, and others.
1 January 2010
- Changed the Bentall Arcade zoomable to a more festive version.
31 December 2009
- The last of the Fuscias huddle together on New Year's Eve.
30 December 2009
- A new menu design looks like the old one but adds sub-menus giving a less cluttered appearance.
19 December 2009
- Changed a Zoomified Edinburgh view for one taken through the snow on Newcastle's Quayside with more interesting detail.
17 December 2009
- Another Australian panorama, misty coastal scene near the Great Ocean Road now also has a larger version.
14 December 2009
- Two of the Australian panoramas, sunrise at Ayre's Rock and The Olgas now have larger versions.
13 December 2009
- Two of the Highgate Cemetery panoramas (which still appear in the Zoomable Gallery) have been replaced with new panoramas from Australia, one showing a sunrise at Ayre's Rock with photographers, and one of The Olgas, and there are two additions to the Zoomable Gallery: a view of St Mary's Cathedral and surroundings from the Sydney Tower, and one of the interior of a shopping mall in Kingston, Surrey.
10 December 2009
- The letterboxed panoramas did not look so good, so instead a navigation window has been added to the zoomable pictures making it possible to get a useful view without using full-screen mode.
8 December 2009
- Altered the initial view of zoomable pictures to show the whole picture, because it was not always clear that the it was much wider than it looked. Very wide panoramas now appear letterbox-shaped, but the full-screen button will always give a more useful view.
7 December 2009
- Added a zoomable picture of Paris from the Montparnasse Tower.
4 December 2009
- Added three pictures from Australia: Blue Gum Trees, a Bungalow in Hall's Gap, and the Anchor of the Marie Gabrielle, wrecked off Moonlight Head in 1869.
3 December 2009
- Added two zoomable pictures from the top of the Sydney Tower, showing Darling Harbour and Eastern Sydney in great detail.
2 December 2009
- Added a QTVR taken from the top of the Sydney Tower, and three Australian panoramas: an evening Sydney skyline, a cold, misty Great Ocean Road panorama, and a photographer waiting for the right light in King's Canyon.
27 November 2009
- Added a QTVR taken in Otway National Park, Victoria, Australia. Fixed an error which was causing the QTVRs to appear the wrong shape. These should all be around 70% of the width and 70% of the height of your page, and will change size as the page size changes.
29 October 2009
- Added another QTVR taken in Jesmond Dene.
28 October 2009
- Buttons now have a more attractive three-dimensional appearance.
26 October 2009
- The long pages (Contents, and this one) have a new "Top" button, which is always in the bottom right corner, and takes you to the top of the page from wherever you are.
22 October 2009
- The slide show on my main page is now a different set of pictures, in portrait orientation
18 October 2009
- Added a QTVR taken in Jesmond Dene and a high-resolution picture of a bridge over the river in the Dene.
17 October 2009
- Added four new Edinburgh QTVRs to the QTVR Gallery, and a zoomable picture of an Edinburgh skyline.
15 October 2009
- Added a Hippo in Gorongosa Game Reserve, and an unidentified motor cycle scrambler near Johannesburg, both taken around 1971.
11 October 2009
- Added a QTVR movie of Worcester Park Station.
4 October 2009
- Added a panorama of the Tyne Bridges, made from five exposures, and a zoomable version from the same viewpoint.
1 October 2009
- Added two motor racing movies to the Movies Gallery, both of rallycross, one at Croft in 1967, and one at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in 2008. Both are on YouTube. My historic Moter Racing movies on YouTube have been viewed more than a quarter of a million times. Beats gathering dust in a cupboard!
30 September 2009
- Added three new "Little Planet" views to the Pictorial Gallery.
27 September 2009
- Added a zoomified panorama of the Tyne Bridges. This picture is a mosaic of thirty exposures in two rows, and is six hundred megabytes in size (20,711 x 5,319 pixels). It would make a print six feet wide at 300 pixels per inch, easily enough for any grain to be invisible to the naked eye.
11 September 2009
- Added a new lion picture taken in Tanzania, and arranged the Wildlife Gallery so that all the lion pictures are together.
10 September 2009
- Changed the stereographic ("Little Planet") projection picture of Bangkok to a new one taken in Newcastle, and added another taken on the Millennium Bridge over the Tyne, and derived from the same source as this QTVR movie .
6 September 2009
- Added some "Little Planet" pictures to the Pictorial Gallery, after finding how easy it is (just pick a suitable picture!). This technique lends itself primarily to 360 x 180 degree panoramic sources, but it can work with non-panoramic images provided that left and right sides are sufficiently similar to stitch together. The Red-Hot Poker picture treated this way made a completely new 'flower'.
5 September 2009
- Minor usability changes: "Click picture to grow/shrink" is now in a corner, leaving more room for the picture, and the "Back" button on pages showing large panoramas now stays in a corner instead of scrolling out of sight.
4 September 2009
- The changes were not an improvement for those who needed it most, users with small screens: making a window narrow enough to see all of a portrait image meant that back on the index screen, thumbnails scrolled out of sight and the window had to be resized again. Thanks to Lynne for pointing this out. The original simpler system of a click to zoom in/out has been reinstated. Keyboard users can zoom with ctrl+/ctrl- (Mac: Cmd+ or Cmd- but remember to uncheck View > "Zoom text only"). Added a full moon picture to the Pictorial Gallery, taken tonight with a Nikon D40x and a Meade ETX90 telescope.
3 September 2009
- Following further efforts to improve the viewing pleasure of those with monitors less well endowed with pixels than mine, I have (again) changed the sizing arrangements of pictures which appear in their own window. I hope the new way is an improvement. Previously, a click on the picture would halve/double its size: now pictures scale automatically according to the pixel dimensions of the window in which they open, and if you make the window larger, the picture is scaled to be larger. If you have a small monitor you get a small picture, and you should be able to see all of it without scrolling. For the technically minded, images are given a percentage width using CSS: for portrait orientation this is 65%, for landscape it is 100%, with 40 pixel left and right margins. Images should scale fluidly as window size is changed. Most (non-panoramic) pictures are 800 x 600 pixels for reasonably quick loading: if you enlarge them too far you may see pixellation.
31 August 2009
30 August 2009
- New zoomable London panorama, showing Canary Wharf, the Tower of London, and HMS Belfast.
5 August 2009
2 August 2009
- New close-up of a Honeysuckle flower, made from eight focus-stacked exposures.
29 July 2009
- The Motor Racing Gallery is now one page instead of three. Some of the footage has recently been professionally digitised, and the quality is outstanding (if I say it myself): the versions on YouTube will be ugraded shortly.
24 July 2009
- The "Galleries" button in the menu bar at the top of the page now has a drop-down menu of available galleries, which are now just one click away from any page with a menu bar, instead of needing a trip back to the Galleries index page. This sadly is no longer used, and forwards you to the Home page. Thanks to Lynne for pointing out the inevitable teething problems (now fixed) with the initial implementation of my new coding. The Motor Racing Galleries (there is one for each year, more or less) already have their own buttons: their menu bar "Galleries" button is now a "Motor" button, leading back to the Motor Racing Home page.
22 July 2009
- New close-up of Hypericum flower heads.
17 July 2009
- New close-up of my Aloe flower head.
16 July 2009
- Several additions today, Noctilucent Clouds in Paris, yellow flowers (with aphids) (zoomable), a fly on a daisy, a scaffolder at work demolishing a temporary bamboo bridge over the Tyne, and a large thistle.
10 July 2009
9 July 2009
- Added an Aloe to the Zoomable Gallery, as well as a zoomified version of the Red-Hot Poker. The Aloe is a focus-stacked panorama. It is made up of three pictures, merged into a vertical panorama. Each of the three is made up of three pictures, focus-stacked using Helicon Focus. There is also a new detail of florets of the same Aloe plant.
8 July 2009
- Added a Red-Hot Poker to the Pictorial Gallery.
7 July 2009
- The recent cursor changes might actually work for users of Internet Explorer, finally. Links on external sites referring to pages here which no longer exist, are now redirected automatically to the appropriate index page, thanks to Google Webmaster Tools which make it easy to discover broken links.
5 July 2009
- Added an second flower picture to the Pictorial Gallery, a close-up view of a Lily, made by stacking exposures focussed at differing distances. Fixed cursor changes: when the mouse hovers over an individual picture (on its own page) the cursor changes to a '+' or a '-' where appropriate, to show that the picture can be grown/shrunk by clicking it.
4 July 2009
- Some of the pictures here (and some others) are also in my Gallery on BBC Tyne's web site.
3 July 2009
- A Skywatcher Universal Camera Adapter has finally got my compact Canon 870is connected to my Meade ETX-90 telescope. I am surprised and pleased with the detail that the combination has produced. Here is the first result, showing part of an eight days old moon yesterday. This is part of a larger picture (four exposures merged together) showing the whole of the terminator. Today I cracked flower photography and reached my target standard. Two achievements in one day...
24 June 2009
- The images on the Checkout page are now the same size as the pop-up images on the index pages, instead of tiny thumbnails. These pictures confirm which picture it is that you are ordering.
17 June 2009
- Two of my QuickTime panoramas, one of the Millennium Bridge in the Mist, and one of a view from the Swing Bridge in Newcastle are now featured on the BBC Tyne web site. Added two more pictures to the Pictorial Gallery.
15 June 2009
- Added a new panoramic view of Beadnell Harbour on a still summer evening last weekend.
9 June 2009
- There is now a separate Motor Racing Contents page, for those who are only interested in this sort of thing.
5 June 2009
- Added two photographs to the Ultrawide Gallery, from the Newcastle side of the Tyne in the early evening, showing some Tyne Bridges, taken using the Tokina 11-16mm ultrawide zoom lens.
4 June 2009
- A successful trip to the Lake District resulted in a number of new pictures. Returning to a ruin in St John's in the Vale, there is now a new one of the Ash tree through a gap in a wall. There is also a new 360 degree panorama of the ruins with Blencathra in the distance, a wide view of the ruined farmhouse, and a view down a nearby flooded track.
27 May 2009
- Added pictures of a police frogman in the Tyne, and a speedboat in a race in South Africa.
26 May 2009
- Added some pictures (new Tokina 11-16mm lens!) from Beadnell, Northumberland, where some old fishing boats and a wooden hut have been left to rot, and are decaying colourfully.
23 May 2009
- Bookmarks of old Motor Racing pages (before the introduction of floating thumbnails) will still work. If they lead to a Gallery page, you will be redirected to the new Gallery page. If you had bookmarked an individual picture page, the "Index" button leads to the new index page for that year, not the old one.
22 May 2009
- Pop-up preview images in Galleries now have captions.
20 May 2009
- Added a picture taken in the Lake District this week, from a ruined house in St John's in the Vale.
19 May 2009
17 May 2009
- Added St Oswald and his raven (since removed) from St Anne's church in Strathpeffer, Scotland. Also added new ultrawide pictures:
- inside the Natural History Museum in London,
- inside the Galleries Lafayette in Paris,
- a seafood stall in Paris,
- a shop window with reflections in Paris. The QTVR thumbnails now reflect the aspect ratio of the full-size pictures and are wide instead of square. All galleries (except the motor racing movies) now have floating thumbnails, with larger, captioned pop-up previews. No pop-ups for the movies because the resolution of individual frames is too small.
3 May 2009
- Added some pictures taken at a cold and wet British Grand Prix 2008 at Silverstone. These were taken with a proper camera, instead of from transparencies, and the quality is much better.
2 May 2009
- The Contents page is now up to date.
30 April 2009
- The Zoomable Gallery and the QTVR Gallery galleries now have a layout which is consistent with the others, with floating thumbnails and instant pop-up previews.
28 April 2009
- Added four new pictures to the Ultrawide Gallery.
18 April 2009
- Preview images on index pages (which appear when you mouse over a thumbnail) are now on the left of the page, enabling more thumbnails to be visible at once even on low-resolution monitors.
- All of the motor racing pages have been updated, with a few additions, and improved quality images. There is now one index page for each year, with floating thumbnails and preview images, consistent with the other galleries. Some index pages cover a few years. Portrait and landscape thumbnails are now the same height to avoid unsightly gutters.
- Links on the Contents page to motor racing subjects still (temporarily) go to the old pages.
2 April 2009
- Corrected errors on Contents page introduced when the new file-naming scheme was introduced with the floating thumbnails.
28 March 2009
- The India, Ultrawide, and Wildlife Galleries now also have floating thumbnails.
26 March 2009
- The way galleries of images are presented is changing, starting with the Pictorial and Panoramic Galleries. Instead of galleries having several index pages, each with up to twelve thumbnails, there is now one page with all of the thumbnails in the gallery, smaller than before. These 'float' to remain in view when you re-size the page. Mousing over a thumbnail pops up a larger version of a picture; clicking takes you to the page showing a 'full-size' version, and in some cases a link to a very large image.
20 March 2009
- Added a new Zoomified picture, of Durham Cathedral, made from eight exposures with a compact camera. This has now been deleted.
21 February 2009
12 February 2009
- In the Pictorial and India Galleries a larger (200 x 300 pixels) image now appears while the mouse is over a thumbnail. Clicking this takes you to the page showing a single larger picture (800 x 600 pixels) as before.
This will give you a better idea of whether a picture might be worth looking at, without leaving the Gallery.
