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Welcome to my pictures collection. These are pictures I've taken on various holidays over the last few years. I decided a while ago to take the best ones and put them up on the web like this. I came up with a theory a while ago that states that whenever you go on holidays, for every 3 or 4 rolls of film you take you'll get one postcard-quality picture. This is basically the one shot you get which wouldn't look out of place on a postcard in a shop (or as a desktop background on your computer). Now I'm not saying all of these ones here are of that quality, but a few of them might be. |
As with any holiday snaps, all of these pictures have a story around them, but I'm not enough of an egomaniac* to think that anyone else would really be interested in my lame holiday stories. As it is, here you have the choice to pick a picture you want to see yourself rather than have to sit there with a fake smile on your face as I go through my photo album and bore you with each one. "And this is when I was in San Francisco, and this was the hotel I was staying at...." Ugh. All of us have been there with some relative or other's holiday snaps, so I'll spare you. Some of the stories might be worth telling, like the time I had to jump from a moving train in the middle of Poland, or when I almost got arrested as a terrorist in Munich airport (and nearly shot as a suicide bomber in Milan), or got lost in the murder capital of the US. Most though would be fairly boring if you didn't already know me personally (or even if you did). Some pics have a little paragraph at the bottom of the page, others are self-explanatory so I left it out.
Like I said, some of these might be postcard quality, or so I think anyway. My favourites would have to be the Colosseum by dusk (which to me looks like something out of a fantasy novel, if you got rid of the gimp in the foreground), the Eiffel tower at sunset, the Hollywood Sign, Alcatraz and the Tatras mountains. Some pictures I put in as just being strange or funny, like the warning sign in Copenhagen or the tourist in Luxembourg.
Some pictures I have here are from trips which I wouldn't exactly qualify as "fun outings", such as the gas chamber and crematorium in Auschwitz or the World War I trenches and cemetery in Ypres. I'm not too sure sure why I'm putting these here, maybe to see if I can make people think a bit. They don't exactly have the sobering effect of say "Schindler's List" or the opening scene on the beach in "Saving Private Ryan", but they had an impact on me while I was taking them. Maybe some of this will come across. Some things you really have to see for yourself though.
Boring technical bit.
Some of these pics were taken with a normal APS camera and scanned in, but most were taken with my Canon PowerShot S100 digital camera. All pics on this page are at 1024x768 resolution, which I picked as a good compromise between quality and size for downloading (for those of you with cable modems or DSL, this is to help those of us who are still stuck with 56k modems, like 99% of the population of Ireland). All of the digital ones were taken at 1600x1200 and 24-bit color, but at anywhere between 200Kb and 800Kb per image, that was too big to put up on the web. If anyone wants one of these pics at the bigger size, just email me at the address below and I'll forward it on.
(hint: replace the "[at]" in the address link above with an "@".
I put that in 'cos I get enough spam as it is and don't need any more)