Photographs from a Trip to Europe - The Netherlands, and Belgium

My wife and I went for a trip to Europe during May 1998. We left on 4th May and returned home on 4th June, after visiting The Netherlands, Belgium, France, Switzerland, and Germany. I kept a diary of our trip, and took about 350 35mm colour film photographs. I hadn't shown any of these photographs on my web gallery before this monthly display, and I thought it was time I presented some.

35mm film photograph,
taken in May 1998, in Leiden, The Netherlands.

This month's display only has photographs taken while we visited The Netherlands and Belgium. I'll try to get some photographs from our visits to France, Switzerland and Germany in next month's display.

For all of the photographs I have included in this month's display, I digitally scanned the film negatives on a Plustek film scanner using LaserSoft Imaging AG's SilverFast software, and adjusted the colours in the captured images to try to recreate the image with the most 'realistic' colours that I could. After considerable experimenting, I found that the colour reproduction in the scans was best when I set the software to scan my Kodak Gold negatives using a "Fuji Superior" film profile (rather than a Kodak Gold film profile). Generally, I am very impressed with the range of colours and tones captured by colour film negatives. I also found unfortunately, the film scans showed many scratches and dust spots. I have tried to spot repair these images as best I could but found that this involved an enormous amount of time. One compromise was to leave repairing some of the scratches (especially those long scratches that run parallel with the long edge of the negatives). I hope you can accept those scratches as just being part of the medium used.