These photos were all taken with a simple digital camera, Olympus 340R, which has been my first (happy) experience with an instant satisfaction type camera where high quality gives way to expedient publishing on the world wide web.

I have found that as with 'real' cameras it pays to use a tripod.  And I now keep a mini tripod attached, which also aids camera grip.

The digital darkroom, using software to alter pixels, has opened new horizons for chemical free subtle photo retouching and image altering.

I soon found the panorama stitching software QuickStitch from Enroute, and began using it. Once you decide between perspective or cylindrical, the program merges 2 - 3 - 4 or more individual shots into one panorama. These will need some cropping and minor retouching. The contrast banding is a tech problem that requires bracket exposures, some new cameras do this automatically. This allows a 1 mega-pixel camera to include much more digital information in each photograph.

Photo storage on the road is a problem because one is dependent on any number of cables, power supplies, and the security of your notebook. It seems that a zip drive or a CD-RW on board with multiple mail backs of data is the only SAFE WAY to go, and remember some extra cables too! Also FORGET about the serial port download, it's WAY TOO SLOW. Use a PCMCIA to SmartMedia reader instead. Test ALL your hardware and software BEFORE you leave. Burn an APPS cd with ALL your critical PHOTO and CAMERA software on it. 

Photoshop 5.5 was used to squeeze the graphics down in size from an average 400 kb and to make the thumbnails. I now prefer to retouch with Adobe Photoshop 6, which has a steep learning curve and a deep set of image manipulation tools, all of the retouching was done in small increments to change the contrast, brightness and  intensity with levels and curves. The sharpness was enhanced with the oddly named 'unsharp mask' .

Remember to do your editing on a bit mapped file [.bmp - .tif] or Photoshop .psd format with layers and just save once to a jpeg file. I want to buy a Nikon D1 2.7mega-pixel camera soon.     sdw