If you were to work your
way through this site you would probably find it inconsistent in standard
both in layout and in picture quality. The reason for that is that it
is not a professional site and it shows the history of it's evolution
in it's pages - which fact you might find interesting.
It was started in December 2000 just as a fun thing to do which combined
my interests in hill walking, photography and computing, with the idea
of introducing others to the possibilities of walking in this forgotten
South West corner of Scotland. At that point I was just starting from
scratch in web design and my pal Sandy whom you will see in many of the
walks was doing his best to help me. At that stage the site we were creating
was my son Allan's and he was letting me put a hill walking section onto
his site - which he was creating to help sell the photographs he takes
for a living under the name South
West Images Scotland That's Allan and Sandy below.
Around 2005 I got a site to myself
at the present address.
Some of the earliest pages from the early days are still on the site -
mainly in the Galloway section - the Awful
Hand Walk for example These were just single page jobs. Then I started
using "Photoshop" photo web galleries as in the Screel
and Bengairn walk but I found this pretty limiting. So I started making
my own web galleries and some of these now run to over 40 pages per walk.
When I started into my
website at first I had been using an Olympus OM10 single lens reflex film
camera and scanning the negatives on Allan's scanner which he used for
film. I moved "up" to digital when Sandy got a new camera in
2000 and gave me his old one.
Sandy's old Kodak gave me images of 960x1280 pixels at 72 dpi or 1.25
mega pixels. In 2003 my wife bought me a Pentax Optio 330 GS pocket digital
when I came out of hospital after having a cancerous kidney removed. I'm
telling you that last bit to give reassurance to anybody that is at present
going through such a trauma - I'm still alive and kicking and going up
hills most weeks.
The Pentax gave me images of 1536x2048 at 72dpi (3.2 mega pixels) until
I let it fall in 2006 when I got a Cannon Powershot A640 which gives me
2736x3648 at 72 dpi which is 10 mega pixel standard with 4x optical zoom.
Again it is a pocket sized camera which I find is ideal for using on a
hill walk. I use it mostly at 80 ASA (or ISO if you prefer) and generally
on "Manual " rather than on "Auto".
In case you don't understand this ASA/ISO business:- as you go down in
ASA number the grainyness of your image gets less and less but you get
the equivalent of less light coming into the camera so you have to use
slower speed of shot or bigger aperture or both (though with aperture
size the "F" number actually gets smaller as the aperture size
gets bigger). The Cannon goes from F2.8 to F8 and from 80 ASA/ISO to 800
ASA/ISO. The low F number also mean less depth of field in close-up photography
but this doesn't affect landscape much unless you have something close
to the camera in the foreground.
I don't use the digital zoom. However, combining the high camera resolution
with the 4x zoom at the stage of taking the picture allows me when I get
into Photoshop to crop out small details from the large image and these
are still good enough for the net. This is I suppose equivalent to using
the 16x digital zoom of the camera which I have found okay for inside
a room but no use on the hill. Have a look at the two pictures on Page
23 in the Durisdeer walk or the three pictures on Pages
28 and 29
in the same walk to see what I am able to get this way.
I am Dunkie by the way and you will see me in some of the pictures that Sandy has taken if you are especially interested. He allows me to use his pictures at will - that's what mates are for isn't it. As I write this in May 2007 Sandy is 69 and I am 64 - again I have put that here to encourage folk to just get out there and get on with it no matter what your age - check out the Criffel walk where another pal of mine Morris was just short of his 86th birthday when he climbed this 1800ft hill. We all stay in Dumfries by the way and have done for many years.