About the pictures

Here’s the equipment we used to shoot the pictures featured in Trip to the USA:

  • Canon EOS 300, consumer-level 35mm SLR camera
  • Tamron AF-Zoom 28-80mm, 1 : 3.5 – 5.6
  • Tamron AF-Zoom 80-210mm, 1: 4.5 – 5.6
  • Hama O-Haze (UV) filters and a polarization filter
  • Hama mini tripod
  • ASA 100 and 200 slide films by Agfa and Kodak

We usually shot one film per day (36 exposures) and ended up with a total of 800 slides. After a careful selection process, we submitted 100 slides for the production of a Kodak Photo CD.

Pictures on the Photo CD come in five resolutions: 192*128, 384*256, 768*512, 1536*1024, and 3072*2048. All the pictures we posted on this site were derived from the version with the highest resolution. I used Adobe Photoshop 4.0 on my G4 to prepare the pictures for the web. Here’s, roughly, what I did:

  1. Cropped image to get rid of the slide’s frame
  2. Applied Dust & Scratches filter if neccessary
  3. Corrected Levels, Brightness/Contrast, and Saturation/Lightness
  4. Applied Sharpen, Sharpen Edges, or Gaussian Blur filters, sometimes only to parts of the image
  5. Reduced image size, usually to 580 pixels
  6. Applied Unsharp Mask filter
  7. Increased canvas size by 10 pixels in all four directions