Photography section:
Wallpapers, Tips and Tests

"The next time you pick up a camera think of it not as an inflexible and automatic robot, but as a flexible instrument which you must understand to properly use. An electronic and optical miracle creates nothing on its own ! Whatever beauty and excitement it can represent exist in your mind and spirit to begin with."    — Ansel Adams, January 1980.
Wallpapers A sample image from my wallpapers Most people come on my site attracted by the free background desktop picture, also known as wallpapers... I have lots of them that I've added over the years, mainly featuring Antarctic coast, Antarctic plateau, mountain climbing, backcountry skiing, rock climbing, USA climbing , nature or various other pictures. You can see a random sample on the left, and also view them in a slideshow.

Here's the list of the newest images.

Gallery

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Climber in black and white. There's a selection of my favorite images and a gallery of vertical images which can also be used as wallpaper if you have a vertical screen (such as an iPhone).

A gallery of black & white and infrared images with some tips.

From the smallest macrophotography to the widest astrophotography.

Our new Grenoble apartment has a great view on thunderstorms and ensuing lightning as well as some clouds.

Visit of a cave in Vercors, the Ganil heavy ion accelerator, the old city of Dubrovnik in Croatia.

And finally a bunch of images that didn't fit anywhere else, like lensless wine pictures or unclassifiable pictures.

Panorama

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Barre des Ecrins at night. On two pages I gathered all the horizontal and Vertical panoramic pictures that you can see around my site, up to a certain date. After that there were just too many, so the most recent are here and here. I have written a program that 'warps' pictures in order to transform them into panorama. It's freeware and here's a tutorial for it.

And here's a list of posters, mostly B&W and panoramic, currently on sale in a store in Briançon. I'm not selling them online but you are certainly welcome to take a look at them.

Besides panoramas, there are other ways to combine images in order to extend the capabilities of photographic equipment, such as extending the dynamic range or increasing the resolution.

Wildlife & culture

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Cute friendly fox. I don't have much of the patience needed for wildlife photography, but still have some images of a friendly fox, some lemurs from Madagascar and other animals (to say nothing of the penguins and Antarctic animals), or more simply autumn pics.

And a few images of people and activity in Madagascar, a old pagan festival in Bacugno, even older multicultural Petra, old non-pagan Jerusalem.

Copyright and $$$

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Extreme skiing

I'm sure you came here to read all about my fascinating copyright information. On the same page, you will also find a list of my public slide shows as well as some contact information should you wish to buy some pictures.

If you want to use or purchase some of my pictures, first make sure they are not placed in a photographic agency, in which case you should contact them, not me.

For a list of pictures available for sale, take a look at the five royalty-free photo archive CDs I sell, featuring between 250 and 390 pictures of Antarctica, penguins, climbing in the Alps, in the USA and many other places. Price is below 50¢ per image.

And if you just want to support my site, look at my money page.

Equipment

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A penguin taking a pause for a photographer My old interest in photography has been rekindled in 2000 by the loss of most of my photographic equipment in the infamous car accident that finished off our honeymoon. I could have decided to delay indefinitely the acquisition of a new camera, instead I bought two ! A Nikon F100 and a Ricoh GR21. More recently I started late on the digital wave with the Ricoh GRD and the Fuji S5 pro.

On that same page you'll find some comments about other photographic gear that passed through my hands but the recent digital compact cameras are on their own.

Getting into digital photography can be confusing for a traditional film user like myself, so I wrote down some basic workflows to get the most out of scanned images or digital cameras, for which I've also tested some RAW file processing softwares and written a bunch of scripts for scanning old images.

Some tips for wedding photography.

And I also have some outdated X-ray advice for travelers.

And a script to scan outdated Kodak disk negatives in an efficient way.

Climbing

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Climbing above the sea in Australia As you may have noticed from the rest of my site, I'm pretty much into climbing, so I have put up some information about taking pictures while climbing and how I prepared the pictures for this site.

Besides climbing, there are also some images of base jumping and some images I found while climbing.

Fisheye

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Fisheye image of astronomy platform. I've had some fun with a fisheye lens and was surprised by the many different things you can do with it. So I wrote a program to turn the resulting round images into fake rectilinear images or half-spherical panoramas, a variant of which can generate funky 360° fisheye images. They can even be printed on paper as philosphere polyhedra.

A not so satisfying attempt at visualizing all my images on a single page, a task out of reach of my old thumbnailer program...

3D

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3D penguins Two pages of anaglyphic 3D images made with a specially modified lens. It needs cyan/red glasses to view the results, but the lens is easy to use.

Nothing to do with 3D, but I have a page about screen calibration on Linux.