Welcome to the photo-journal for my 1999 trip to England and Scotland!
Some information about this trip, to get you started:
| When? | May 23 to June 8, 1999 |
| Where? | A few days in Birmingham to see a friend, then a tour of the city of Bath, followed by a weekend in the Lake District. Then, a week around Scotland, and finally, a couple of days in London. |
| Who? | I spent the first few days visiting Jolene, an English woman whom I met a year ago while she was working in California. My girlfriend Erin joined me after that for the remainder of the trip. While in Scotland, Erin and I stayed with John and Ali, a couple I met there in 1995, when I came out with another friend for a wedding. |
A short sidebar about the photographs on this site. (I'll spare you from all the other technical details, unless you're really curious.)
All of the photos here, except where noted, were taken by either myself or Erin. My camera was actually my Dad's, a good ol' fashioned Canon AE-1 35mm SLR. Erin's was a uniquely stylish, fresh-out-of-the-box Yashica Profile Zoom 4000 point-and-shoot APS.
Our use of the cameras was not without incident. I had some problems with the Canon, not being very familiar with it, which you'll read about later. And for months after the trip, we thought the Yashica was either a piece of junk or broken...until we realized that the poor quality of photos it produced were mostly the handiwork of Ritz Camera, who developed the photos with too much magenta. (In their defense, they've always done a fantastic job on my 35mm film, but they have to outsource APS developing to another lab, which is the real culprit.) A return trip to them five months later made things much better, but the photos still had that point-and-shoot quality, with less intensity of color. Any attempt to use the built-in zoom also fouled up any chance of decent focus.
Enough chatter...let's get going!