Camera SLR body
Most photos on this website are from slides made with a Contax 139 Quartz 35 mm manual focus single lens reflex camera body bought in 1986 which is still functioning without any problem.
Under the brand name Contax, Kyocera (Kyoto Ceramics) has launched excellent cameras with Carl Zeiss lenses on the market for many years. Many Contax owners regret that Kyocera has decided not to continue these since April 2005.

Camera lenses and filters
Many slides were photographed through a Carl Zeiss Planar T* 50mm F1.4 standard lens while others were taken with a Tokina AT-X M 90mm F2.5 macro lens also used as a short tele. For corrections and special effects Cokin filters were applied of which the linear polariser filter was the one most used.

Film
All the slides were exposed on Fuji RD 100 film.

Film scanner
The slides were digitised with an Acer (called Benq these days) ScanWit 2720S Film Scanner in combination with the multi-vendor scanner software VueScan from Hamrick Software for better quality scans and more scanning flexibility than with the original supplied MiraPhoto software.

Flatbed scanner
Also included on this website are photos made by some of the other group members. These photos were scanned with an inexpensive DEXXA Flatbedscanner 4800. The trekking permit, Mani Stone and T-Shirt embroideries were also scanned on this scanner. DEXXA no longer exists, but in reality the scanner is an Artec AS6E with a different brand name.

Scanning technique
A few scanning tips by Wayne Fulton is recommended for those who are interested in improving their own scanning technique.

Photo editor
After scanning a photo editor was used to retouch (mainly removing dust and scratches), correct colour, gamma, brightness and contrast and resize most photos to a normal (600 x 400 pixels) and a thumbnail size (180 x 120 pixels) image. The final images are a bit sharpened.
Paint Shop Pro from Jasc Software (version 9 was the latest) was used as an image and photo editor until July 2007. Jasc Software was sold in 2005 to Corel which changed the later versions of Paint Shop Pro in a "one click does all" photo editor which in the opinion of the Nepal - Trek Around Annapurna - Photo gallery is not very suitable for professional image editing. Since then Adobe Photoshop is used for all image editing. For compatibility with the existing Paint Shop Pro files the Paint Shop Pro Format file plug-in from Telegraphics is used to open them in Adobe Photoshop.
The favicon is made with Adobe Photoshop and the ICO (Windows Icon) Format file plug-in also from Telegraphics. See for more information about this favicon the Display and Internet browser adjustment page.

Wallpaper Compression
The wallpaper BMP files are compressed to self-extracting executable files and Zip files made with WinRAR.

Web design tool
The website is created with Adobe Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver is excellent in creating HTML code and maintaining the links in a website. It makes publishing to the webspace on the World Wide Web an easy task.

Website hosting
The website is hosted "carbon neutral" by XS4ALL Internet B.V. in The Netherlands on the Unix/Apache platform.
Internet provides us the luxury of unprecedented sharing of information, but at the same time the amount of energy needed to keep millions of websites up and running is enormous. Many people do not realise that the internet has become a major contributor to carbon emissions. Cleanbits enables you to easily check web servers environmental footprint and compensate the carbon emissions generated by the hosting of a website. Whether compensation is through renewable energy or internet forests, the objective is to create a sustainable internet.

Website monitoring and uptime statistics
The availability and behaviour of this website on the World Wide Web are checked with WatchMouse Free and WatchMouse Site Monitor at regular intervals.

Web page hit counter
StatCounter is a free yet reliable invisible web tracker, highly configurable web page hit counter and measures real-time detailed web stats. It is able to analyse and monitor all the visits to this website in real-time.

Online payments
Donations or license fees can be paid with any major credit or debit card by using the PayPal secure website. PayPal is one of the easiest ways for websites to accept payments online.