This website has many hundreds of pictures ... nearly 150 megabytes worth as of this writing. These pictures came from various sources and most pictures have been digitally processed in one or more ways. This “tech note” is intended for those visitors who want to know more about how these pictures were obtained and processed.

1) The “DVD captures” are from the “Brokeback Mountain DVD Widescreen #26315” version of BBM as released by “Universal Studios Home Entertainment”, ISBN 1-4170-3032-1. The DVD captures were obtained using “CyberLink PowerDVD 6”. The time codes given here for individual picture captures are as reported by PowerDVD 6; other programs may or may not report the same exact time codes. The DVD captures were digitally “processed” using two “image editors”: “Picture Window 3.1h” software was used to remove the black “border” left by Power DVD at the top and bottom of the images; and “Adobe PhotoDeluxe 2.0” and Picture Window were used to further process the resulting images for brightness and contrast. Finally, the images were saved as thumbnail (128w x 81h pixels) and medium size (512w x 327h pixels) “.jpg” files using Picture Window with a quality of “90” and color sampling of 4:1:1. In general, most thumbnails are 3-4 KB, and most medium size pictures are 20-40 KB. Dave Cullen’s BBM forum has an interesting on-going discussion of the technical issues involved in transfering BBM from film to DVD; see Brokeback DVD: tech, transfer quality, formats and filming.

2) The “Contributed photos” are from various individuals, mostly Jim Bond, Rob Freeman, Barry Gilligan, Steve Gin and Bob Sohomuch. Their pictures were taken late May, early June 2006, and late July, early August 2006. Steve Gin continues to take pictures to this day.

The principal contributors used both film and digital cameras, including “Nikon F” and “Pentax MZ-10” 35mm SLR film cameras, and “Canon PowerShot S2 IS” (2048 x 1536 pixels), “HP Photosmart 735” (2048 x 1536 pixels), “Olympus E20” (2560 x 1920 pixels), “Pentax Optio S5i” (2560 x 1920 pixels) digital cameras. Their “raw” pictures were digitally processed using the image editors mentioned above. This processing, when necessary, included some or all of the following: enhancing brightness and contrast using various “filters” and “gradient masks”, some adjustment of color saturation, reduction of camera lens distortion, and “warping” to correct for perspective distortion. Finally, the images were saved as thumbnail (128w x 96h pixels), medium size (512w x 384h pixels) and large size (1024w x 768h pixels) .jpg files using Picture Window with a quality of “90” and color sampling of 4:1:1. (Note that all pixel heights are “nominal”; actual heights may vary.) In general, most thumbnails are 3-4 KB, most medium size pictures are 20-50 KB, and most large size pictures are 100-300 KB. All processing was done on a PC having a “ViewSonic VG800” LCD display monitor that was color calibrated with “Colorific” software. All the digital pictures contain technical data embedded within the .jpg files generated by the cameras that were used to take the pictures; unfortunately, these data were “lost” from pictures that were processed with Adobe PhotoDeluxe 2.0. The data that does exist may be read in Picture Window by “opening” the .jpg picture files and selecting “File Comments” under the “Window” option; other image editing programs most likely allow reading this data also.

3) The “Albums” photos were contributed by many different people using many different cameras, including FujiFilm “FinePix S5200”, Olympus “C5050Z” and Panasonic “DMC-LC40” cameras. Undoubtedly, some photos were processed by their contributors before we received them. In general, our processing of these photos has been minimal. The “Slide Show” feature of Picture Window was used to create both the thumbnails and the “full size” photos for this website. Full size photos are nominally 640w x 480h pixels, and range from 30-90 KB. Picture Window also created the HTML files for both the “Index Page” and the “Album” pages together with the internal HTML links needed to navigate between the various photos within the individual albums.

As can be seen from this collection of pictures, such variables as time of year, time of day, weather, sunlight, cloud cover, all greatly affect the degree to which the viewer is able to appreciate and experience the various movie locations, in photographs, and in person. When looking at these pictures, the technical differences between the cameras used to take them are of relatively little importance compared to these variables.

If you visit the mountain locations of BBM, be aware that any snow cover you see, may, or may not, approximate that seen in the contributed photos. If you intend to take pictures of BBM locations you visit, be aware also that because of the digital processing done to most of the pictures on this website, photos you take, may, or may not, approximate the pictures you see here even if you are able to take pictures under “perfect” conditions.

BG / 15 October 2006