All pictures are M. Vincent van Mechelen's copyright and were taken in the Northern summer, 62 years after the Second World War. They have only been reduced in size; they have not (yet) been photo-processed or altered in any other way. Especially the pictures from the plane on the way back were taken with the possibility of a more or less extensive further processing in mind.

Click one of the six selected photographs above for a first enlargement and a reduction or further enlargement to 12.9 times its width and height. Click one of the geographical links for access to all photographs of a particular area or taken when traveling. You will always be able to determine the background (and sometimes text) colors of a page by clicking on one of the color bars at the bottom (for example, if you find a background picture too distracting.)

As a rule the pictures in the public directories on this site are reductions from size 2576x1920 (if horizontal) to 515x384. (Some of them, taken with an older camera, from 2560 to 512.) In other words they are 20% of the original width and 20% of the original height. The six miniatures above (reduced to 3.1% in both directions) provide links to copies which are 40% of the original width and height. All backgrounds of the lower-level geographical documents show pictures of the area in question. They consist of a copy of a reduction of 515 pixels wide or high which was first enlarged to 1024x768 (if horizontal) or 512x687 (if vertical) and then reduced in .jpg quality in order to bring the size down to not much more than 100 kB.

For the names of the picture files the following type of code is used: N3E2A001.jpg. The first letter determines the order of the pictures in a subdirectory. N is the default letter. The first figure denotes the degree of reduction: 2 for about half the original, 3 for about a quarter and 6 for one thirty-second. The second letter identifies the camera used. The second figure is the number of the trip to the country in which the photographs were taken. The third letter must be looked at in combination with the 3-digit number at the end, which is given by the camera. If the same number is given to different pictures on different memory cards, different letters are used to distinguish between series of pictures.