This site is best viewed on a Macintosh computer (because our photographs are optimized for the Mac's screen brightness) with a minimum of 16-bit color ("thousands") and a screen resolution of 800x600 or higher. Windows machines should be set to High Color (16-bit) or True Color (24 or 32 bit). We mainly run Apple's Safari browser, though it should look OK on any reasonably recent browser. The site uses frames, styles, and a little bit of Javascript. It is possible to view the pages with a browser that is not frame-enabled, but navigation will not be as convenient. Without support for styles, things will become very ugly indeed. Finally, having Javascript enabled and frames disabled will render the site unusable because there will be no way to navigate it.

www.kiechle.com is edited on a Mac Pro with two 4-core 2.8 GHz Intel processors, 10 gigabytes of RAM and 2 terabytes of on-line storage; the machine runs OS X. When traveling, we carry a MacBook Pro to process our images. We use a large variety of image processing software depending on the situation; applications we own include Nikon NX/2, DxO Optics Pro and DxO Filmpack, Apple Aperture, and Adobe Photoshop CS4. Specifications on any of these software titles may be obtained from the vendors' respective web sites; for more information on the most advanced operating system in the world and the awesome hardware it runs on, take a look at Apple's web site.

The site still contains a few photographs that were taken with a Minolta Maxxum 9000 conventional 35mm camera and scanned with a UMAX UC630 flatbed scanner, but in July 1998, we began using a shirtpocket sized Fujifilm MX-700 digital camera. In May 2001, we added an Olympus C3040Z to our inventory. We bought the Olympus for its higher resolution, faster lens, and very impressive feature list. The new camera was used for most pictures on this site until April 2004 when we acquired a Nikon D70 digital SLR. This addition helped us overcome some of the limitations we had encountered with our previous digital cameras, most notably in the area of shutter lag. In early 2008, we supplemented the excellent D70 with a Nikon D300 SLR which was used for the majority of images from then on. Frequently, though, we carry both the D70 and the D300 with different lenses attached; either camera is outstanding and perfectly adequate for the level of quality one aims for on the web. The majority of our photographs are posted with embedded EXIF data; this makes it possible for those who are interested to obtain information on shutter speed, aperture, focal length, and so on by means of a simple EXIF reader.

To create and edit the web pages, we now use BBEdit, an excellent text editor from Bare Bones Software. Previous versions of the site were done with Adobe PageMill 3.0, and we also looked at some of the higher-end graphical HTML editors. Sadly, none of these tools produce clean and coherent HTML code, and so we're back to doing things the old-fashioned way: by typing text. BBEdit does provide quite a bit of assistance and performs all kinds of validations on the code. If you really want full control over your HTML code, we highly recommend this product.

Our web site is hosted by inmotion Hosting. We switched to them in October of 2007.

Home | Site Info | Family | The Area | Trips | France | Work | Odds & Ends

This page was last modified on November 15, 2008
Send feedback about this page to feedback@kiechle.com
http://www.kiechle.com/site/techinfo/techinfo.htm

All contents © 1999-2010 The Kiechles