About

I made this webpage mostly to share photos and outdoors/travel stories with my family and friends. I think I first started posting photos back in 2001 (before the term "blog" had even been coined), and usually only posted a few of my best photos per year. This site became really useful for me in 2004 when I went to Germany, because (a) I was travelling with a digital camera this time and (b) the site was a great tool to stay in touch with people back home. The old site was pure, handwritten HTML, and although it looked kind of simple I think it was a had a nice clean look and it was a great format for posting travelouges. Here's what it used to look like - no bells and whistles, just the facts!

I decided to redo the site (you're now looking at Version 2) because I had run out of room on my free web host and needed to find a better place to host photos, so I figured I might as well start from scratch. My rainy day project for this winter was to redesign the layout and look of the site and I'm pretty happy with the result. To get the look I wanted I had to teach myself CSS, which I have to admit is not too confusing, but it did take a while to figure everything out. Although I came up with the style for the site on my own, I got a lot of tips on CSS syntax from Free CSS Templates and this blog, both of which I found just by typing CSS into Google. After checking out a few of the free photo hosting sites I decided that Photobucket's Free account was the best deal for me.

Some of the photos on this site were taken by other people, and I think for almost all of them I've given credit in the caption. However, there's probably quite a few uncredited shots taken by Jodi or Mark, so keep in mind that not all these amazing photos are mine!

I use Autostitch to put my panorama photos (example1, example2) together. It's written by a CS Grad student at UBC and I really like it. It seems to give almost perfect stitches unless I'm shooting directly into the sun for part of the panorama