This is the FAQ bit, the page to visit if you want to know
anything about how and why this site was started, where all these pictures come from, what
software is used to produce it — you know the
kind of thing.
If you're still left with any unanswered questions about the Anna Friel Homage Page
after reading this, please feel free to mail
me at the address given in the 'Contacting The Site' section
at the bottom of this page. Ideas, opinions or feedback on the site
are also welcome in the
Guestbook.
First Things First
This site is designed
to
be viewed at a minimum resolution of 1280*1024 pixels. .
The site stats tell me that over 80% of visitors are
running Microsoft
Internet Explorer.
While these pages should be compatible with the latest
releases of all main browsers, there may be a few cosmetic elements to the site design that
may only work,
or work better/fully, for the
overwhelming majority of you who are running IE.
The History of the Homage Page
This resource
actually started as nothing more than a by-product of my wanting to learn html
coding in the mid-nineties. I was looking to make some use of the Web space that came with my
dialup account,
and I set to pondering on a suitable subject that might interest a
few other net users.
So why Anna Friel? Well, Anna was a young and stunningly pretty actress who had
recently left the TV soap
Brookside and was
just beginning to
market her 'cool babe' credentials. I wasn't a fan of the programme, nor
particularly overwhelmed by Anna's acting abilities to be
perfectly honest, but there was something about
her that set me to trawling the net for a decent picture to add to my collection of pleasing images to look at on cold winter nights.
When I found absolutely nothing online at all I realised that I had found my subject matter
AND could
fill a void by creating the first Web site about her.
The Anna Friel Homage Page was duly born on 1 September
1996 with a vast(!) library of some 25 .jpg files, the 'Homage' in question being
to the lady's undoubted pulchritude. Thanks to the generosity of a couple of visitors, and my acquisition of a flatbed
scanner, the collection of scans grew rapidly
and I soon ran out of room on my
ISP's customer Web server.
Although I had achieved my initial aim there was no question of abandoning the site.
By now
it had taken on a life of its own, and it was gratifying that others out there
enjoyed and appreciated my efforts. I'd even been contacted by Des, Anna's
dad, who was looking to start the 'official' online Anna resource and was seeking
some coding advice. He also wanted to know how I'd
managed to collect far more pictures of his daughter than he had himself!
Additional Web space was available but
prohibitively expensive, so I started searching for another ISP with a better standard
allocation and the site moved to a new home with 25Mb of space just before
Christmas 1997. That sufficed for a while, but
November 1998 saw the site move again to take advantage of an offer of unlimited
web space. The 100Mb mark was breached in October 1999, and
the domain name —
annafriel.net
— was acquired at Christmas that year.
The aim of the Homage Page? Simply to
bring together and share with you as many images
and videos of Anna as
possible, and to maintain a factual News section that keeps
up to date with her career. The Site is updated whenever
there is anything new to report, record or scan, and is totally free to access.
There are no restricted members areas, no pop-up/under
ads or sponsors' links, no lame watermarking or
branding of the
photos.
The only request that I make of visitors
in return is that you
send or alert me to any pictures and/or information you come across that are not already
here. Thanks to all those who have made a contribution for the rest of us to enjoy,
and particularly to those whose purchases of the site cd have helped towards
the costs of running the site.
About the pictures
There are currently
2,805 photos
archived in the collection which, thanks to
numerous collages, contain
around 5,000
images of Anna. Several are (or may appear to be) duplicates, having been scanned
or saved at higher resolutions when better quality originals were published, or by virtue
of the fact that they are very similar poses that have been sourced from the same photo
shoot. More recently the original hi-res digital images
from some of the shoots have surfaced and been added to the archives. The full collection of images currently takes
over 350Mb of storage space.
Many of the files were created and supplied to me by 'SJR', who is
responsible for the FRIA series of scans and video captures.
He deserves much of the credit for the initial stock of pictures at the Homage
Page. Others have
been contributed by some of the visitors to the site, or
were found on UK Bulletin Boards or other web sites. The rest —
812
so far — I have scanned myself.
The original photos, taken from many different publications (TV guides, newspapers, magazines
etc.), are scanned at a resolution of 300 dpi. This setting produces a
file of approx. 2500*3500 pixels — a
ludicrous 26 Mb in native Photoshop format!
— from an A4
image. It's then a comfortable size for editing out any blemishes
(there are always some, caused by dust specs or limitations in the printing
process, scanning software etc.), and I also do what I can to
remove any text that publishers seem so fond of covering pictures with.
This is primarily achieved by cloning adjacent and similar areas of the picture
to cover the offending material, but is sometimes impossible to do
satisfactorily.
Enhancement filters are applied before resizing the image down to a maximum
of 1600 pixels high, dependant on
the size and quality of the original image. This
also reduces the file size to a more manageable average of
100 to 300kb when saved in .jpg format.
Of course any originals that are smaller than A4, or appear on inferior media
(e.g. newsprint), are that much more difficult
to digitise and are of smaller dimensions and lower overall quality. I don't consider myself an
expert at all, and only my very best efforts from top-quality original photos
can compare with the skills of the likes of Maelstrom and
Chumba.
Finally, I really must post a big thank you
here to the original photographers. While it can't be easy to
take a poor picture of Anna you will see in the Galleries here many examples of the vision
and skill that some professional snappers possess; they form the creative
element of this site — I've
just collected them together, and done what I can not to spoil anything too much
in the
process.
Tools
The scans that I have done myself
are created using an HP Scanjet flatbed scanner and
edited in Adobe Photoshop.
As the site has grown so much over the years, and html coding has developed
further, I'm now
using Frontpage to do the donkey work of building and maintaining the
Homage Page; the site was previously hand-coded using
Textpad.
Copyright
Whatever the original source of the scans you'll get no arguments
from me that the copyright to all of the images found on the Homage Page most likely
resides with the photographer who took them or the
company or magazine that commissioned or first published them.
If you hold the copyright to anything here — and are mean-spirited enough to want to
deprive us of a copy! — mail me with the details and some proof of title, and it will
be removed from the collection.
Contacting The Site
To contact the site, please click
