My idea in creating these web pages is to have a showcase for the photos I take, to allow my friends and family to see them. As I live in a different country to all my family and most of my friends, this is an easy way for people to keep in touch with what I'm doing. A lot of the photos shown here are just records of holidays or weekend trips. As such, a number of the photos appearing on these pages will be of interest only to a few. However, I hope that at least some of them have enough artistic merit to be interesting in their own right
Whether you like these photos artistically or not is a matter of individual taste. What is
certain is that the image quality on these pages is not wonderful This is principally because
I've had to shrink and compress all images fairly drastically in order to avoid very long
download times, and also due to restrictions on storage space for these pages. All new additions to these pages (starting from 20/2/2004) will be even smaller and more compressed, as I have had some problems with unauthorised and uncredited reproduction of my work on other peoples sites.
If you would like a good quality copy of one of the photos on this site (either as an image file or on photographic paper), then please contact me. If you would like to use any of the images on your own web site then please ask me first.
I've used fairly minimal captions throughout these pages. If you're interested to know more about any of the places shown, send me an e-mail.
There are some older versions of these pages still knocking about the internet, due to Wanadoo deactivating my old user account when I moved house but leaving the web content on their servers, untouchable and frozen in time. It's possible that you're looking at an outdated version now. If you're not sure then this link - www.mjotad.org - will always take you to the most recent version.
You'll enjoy viewing the photos on these (and other) pages a lot more with a correctly-configured graphics card and monitor.
Firstly, make sure you set your graphics card to display in 32-bit colour. 16-bit colour is OK if your graphics card is old, but 32-bit colour really does make a difference.
Secondly, make sure that the brightness and contrast controls on your monitor are set properly. This is not quite as self-evident as it may seem. Clicking on this link, or alternatively on this one will take you to pages with instructions and test patterns to help you to set up your monitor correctly.
All the photos on these pages, unless specifically stated otherwise, have been taken by me, and as such are ©opyright M.J. Dougan. Their reproduction is prohibited without prior written approval.
Some images have been scanned from 35mm slides or negatives. An increasing number have been taken with digital cameras. If I ever get access to a medium format scanner, then I'll add some pictures taken with old roll-film cameras.
All the photos appearing on these pages have been at least minimally processed using The GIMP, and Pixieplus. They have been reduced in size and given fairly severe jpeg compression in order to reduce download times and to allow me to fit a reasonable number of images on this site. Obviously the quality of the images suffers from this reduction. As mentioned above, anyone who would like either a full-size image or a copy on photographic paper should contact me.
There are a small number of panoramic images appearing in these pages. A number of these were prepared using the free and very powerful PanoTools programs to stitch separate digital images into a single panorama. These programs have an extremely steep learning curve, (I use the Linux versions, which means that the learning curve is not only steep but also slippery), but I would recommend anyone interested in producing panoramas to investigate them. If you do, then you'll probably find the PanoTools FAQ to be of immeasurable help.
More recently I have started to use Hugin, an Open Source program for preparing panoramic images based on PanoTools. It is still beta software and crashes occasionally, but it is nevertheless very useable and vastly simplifies the creation of Panoramas.
I have tested to make sure that these pages display correctly on a number of different browsers: Mozilla, Mozilla
Firefox, Opera, and Konqueror. I haven't tested it on internet explorer and don't intend to. As far as I am able to (which means apart from the garbage which Wanadoo automatically sticks at the start of all the pages they host), I have made sure that the code on these pages follows W3C standards, and as such it should display correctly on any modern standards-compliant browser.
It has recently come to my attention that Wanadoo are making pop-up windows with advertising appear when my pages are loaded. I'm not happy about this, since apart from the fact that pop-ups are extremely annoying, I don't see why Wanadoo should seek to earn advertising revenue from the content of my pages when I'm paying for them to be hosted. If like me you find pop-ups annoying I suggest that you use a browser which allows you to block them. My current favourite is Mozilla Firefox. It works so well at blocking unwanted pop-ups that it was several months before I realised what Wanadoo were up to.