What's New?

November 1, 2009:

Lots of Halloween Photos this year:

September 13, 2009:

Time passes fast!  First off, this site will now work for the most part in modern browsers other than Internet Explorer.  Second, here are the photos from the summer of 2008 through the summer of 2009, including two major trips, as usual in reverse chronological order:

 

June 23, 2008:

I finally got to listing the November and December photos here, plus I posted more photos for January-May of 2008, again in reverse chronological order:

 

November 1, 2007:

Finally got a chance to organize all the photos from the last twelve months, so here they are in reverse chronological order:

 

November 10, 2006:

Boy, time really flies - it's been almost four years since I (Alex Hisen) wrote here! First of all, the site should be faster now (though folders with a hundred photos can still take a bit to load). Secondly, we have a new camera - it's a Sony DSC-R1, a 10.3 Megapixel digital camera with a 24-120 35mm equivalent lens (it's not an SLR). This means that we have a ton of very good looking photos but they are quite large.

To accomodate 10.3 Megapixel photos (that's a whopping 3888x2592 resolution and a typical uncompressed JPEG size of 3-4 Megabytes per photo), I've made a number of improvements in the "home-grown" software that runs this site. First, when photos are uploaded, they are run through the AMImageResizer Microsoft .NET little program Jeff wrote a few years ago. This compresses each image down to about 400-600 Kilobytes at the same resolution with very minimal loss of quality (which only becomes somewhat noticeable when the image is further resized down in resolution). The 'originals' are then stashed away and the images are further resized (using ImageMagick) down to 1024x768 and that's the size they are displayed in on this site. However, you can click on the new Download icon to get the original high-res photo. I've actually gone back to older photos for which I had high-res originals from other people's cameras (such as our Wedding photos) and placed those originals there for download via this icon.

Because we now have a ton of photos and because we are expecting another child, the existing and new photos have been re-organized yet again into a more chronological structure (i.e. there is now a year for each folder from 2000 through 2006 and there are photos both in the root of a folder such as 2005 and in further topical or event sub-folders). Trips are still separate (and old B&W Melekino photos have been moved to a new FromRussia folder). A number of minor events have been moved from Events to the year in which they occurred. Note that the year divisions don't exactly occur on January 1st. Instead a year essentially starts in the spring. This way, photos for various winter activities from a given season (such as Skiing) are not broken up into two years. I've updated the links from older posts on this page, so they should all go to the right place. One last note - there are now just too many photos for me to name each one. :-(

So, here is the list of photos posted in the last four years in chronological order:

 

Posted prior to December 8, 2002:

Posted prior to August 24, 2002: