scarlet elf-cap
About me
I am a 61 year old retired male, living in North Devon with my wife, Maggie. I have been an active amateur photographer since my early teens, and Devon is a wonderful place to pursue this hobby.
Maggie is a keen gardener, and we visit as many of the wonderful gardens in thia part of the country as we can. Of course, I always take a camera, and so much of my photography is of gardens, flowers and plants.
For many years, I have also had a strong interest in computers and software, and now all my photography is done in the 'digital darkroom'.
Steve Morton
Why I created this site
Origins
This site was originally created to the share pictures that I took on a very wet scrambling expedition in North Wales with the other people on the trip, and the first version went live in May 2005. I have since removed the gallery that contained those pictures, as we are no longer in contact with the people involved. In those days, I had a rudimentary understanding of HTML, and this was enough to hack the web galleries produced by Photoshop into a complete site.
The Wedding
Then came my stepson Marc's wedding in November 2006. Marc's lovely bride is Amy, who is American, and although some of her family were able to attend the wedding in the UK, many were not, and so I added all the wedding pictures to the site so that they could share the day.
Progess to date
Time passed, and I retired from my job in Cambridge. Maggie and I moved to North Devon, and I started taking a lot of photographs of the area, which we wanted to share with our friends back in Cambridge, and our families, to show why we had moved so far away. Now that I had some time available, and in an attempt to keep my few remaining grey cells functioning, I decided to try to learn HTML, CSS and Javascript in more detail, and then re-design and build the site up to provide a better showcase for my photographs, with potential for adding other types of content. You are looking at the result!
Steve Morton
Viewing
I have developed a strong preference for Firefox as my main browser, not least because it supports colour management and respects the colour profiles (sRGB, if anyone is interested) that I include in the image files. If you have a calibrated and profiled display, and view this site in Firefox, you should see the images exactly as I do - so if you don't like the colours, you know who to blame!
This site has been developed for Internet Explorer v7, on a 1280 x 1024 pixel screen, and I have tested it as well on Firefox v3 and on Safari v3.2.2.
It also seems to work well in Google's new browser Chrome, and recently I've noticed that this has become my main test browser.
I've tried to design it in such a way that it scales to other resolutions, and to windows that are less than full screen - let me know whether you think it works - or not! The site makes extensive use of Javascript to display the images and text, so please ensure that your browser allows the scripts to run. Yes, I do realise that this last sentence isn't necessary - if you didn't have Javascript enabled, you wouldn't be able to read this!
I have just had a quick look at the site in IE8, which Microsoft has now released. The fades between the images on the gallery pages are not very smooth, although I have tried to select the best combination of fade amount and fade speed. I'm still working on this, but if it offends you, I suggest that you use Safari, Chrome or Firefox, all of which work as intended.
Steve Morton
Copyright and use of the photographs
All photographs on this site are ©Steve Morton.
Downloading photographs
The photographs are simple .jpg files (not Flash!), and can be downloaded in the usual ways. You may freely download any photographs for your own, non-commercial, use. If you want to use any of them on your own web site or other publication, I would appeciate an acknowledgement and a link to this site (e.g. Photograph by Steve Morton, from www.stevemortonphotography.co.uk), and an e-mail telling me what you are doing. Please ensure that the EXIF data in the files, which also contains my copyright notice, remains intact.
Commercial use
If you want to use any photographs from this site for commercial purposes (i.e. if you want to use them in any web site or publication that exists for the purpose of selling or promoting products or services), please contact me for permission before so doing.
High resolution versions
The .jpg files on this site are low resolution, and have their longest dimension set to 640 pixels. I also have high resolution versions, which are suitable for printing up to at least 13" x 19". If you are interested in obtaining these high resolution files, perhaps to make prints of these photographs yourself, or to use them in printed media, please contact me.
Prints
At present, I have no intention of selling prints from this site. However, if you think that a print of one or more of these photographs is exactly what you need on your wall, please contact me and we'll see what we can work out.
Steve Morton
Site Hosting
This site is currently hosted by Free Virtual Servers (FVS).
The early versions were hosted in the free space provided by NTLworld (now Virgin), which was my ISP back when we we lived in Cambridge. Sadly, there is no cable network accessible from our part of Devon, so when we moved down here, I changed my ISP to BT Total Broadband on an ADSL link. BT claimed to provide free web space on a Geocities server, but when I couldn't make that work reliably, I looked around for other options.
FVS came up in a Google search, and seemed to provide everything I needed, so I signed up for their free package. This proved to be an excellent choice, and enabled me to get the site up and running again very quickly.
As I put more and more pictures on to the site, I started to bump up against the bandwidth limit of the free package, and so I switched to the cheapest paid-for package.
So far, I have only once contacted the FVS Technical Support group, and received excellent, prompt service.
I therefore have absolutely no hesitation in recommending Free Virtual Servers for anyone who wants to set up a site like this.
Steve Morton