It's amazing what you can find when you are a grown up kid. I started collecting HotWheels cars in December 2000, when we were shopping for my wife's cousins (who are substantially younger than we are). We picked up a couple of cars for them, and I discovered the Pike's Peak Celica. It was a pretty neat car (I've always liked rally cars, and Toyotas in particular), and it was only a buck -- so why not?

Since then, I've made a habit of dropping into the local megastores like Zellers or Walmart on a semi-regular basis (I usually drop into one or two a week) and dig through their available cars. Most of the time if I do find one I want, it is only one or two.

The collection has since blown up over a hundred cars, nearly all of which are 2000/2001 model years. I'm not going for completeness in my collection, I just buy the cars that I think are neat at the time. And since they are toys, I open them and play with them (you'll note some play-damage in some of the pictures).

I was fortunate enough to recover a few of the cars from my childhood. These cars are displayed in the Unidentified section. I think I recall all of these cars belonging to either my sister or my brother. These were played with, thrown around, and stepped on -- they are heavily damaged. Also added to the Unknown section are toys from my wife's childhood.

About the images and index pages

Right, the main thing about the index pages is that they are huge. Painfully huge. Each of the index pages has the number indicated of thumbnail pictures on it in a massive table format. And the individual pictures are even bigger (see below for details). I had the opportunity to have a friend attempt a download at 28.8K, and it was painfully slow. Having high-speed both at home and at work has obviously spoiled me far more than I had previously thought. Not sure what I am going to do about that just yet, but clearly some kind of low-bandwidth option is needed.

Also, the pages are pretty table intensive so I know that Netscape 4.x will probably give you trouble with them -- most of my Netscapes of that vintage refused to render tables until everything inside them had been downloaded. (This increases the accuracy of the table render, and increases the overall speed of the render, but at a cost of being able to read the content before everything is downloaded -- meaning that even though the browser works faster, you end up waiting longer.)

All told, the only browser these pages are guaranteed to be viewable in is the Konqueror for KDE 2.2.0 which is currently installed on my main system. It should probably be OK in other browsers, but I cannot and will not promise anything.

The pages were generated by my prototype mkgallery script which is based on lessons learned by the excessively complicated mk_index script. Each page is generated automatically when the web site is pushed to the web server; the only things permanently stored in the repository are the individual pictures, a header for the control file, and the master inventory file.

Each car was shot on a white piece of paper lit by two soft 60W bulbs. The bulbs give a soft orangy look to the pictures, which is corrected by the manual white balance setting on the camera.

The camera is a Sony Mavica CD-1000. For shooting, camera was set to maximum zoom and macro mode, with all other settings (other than the white balance) on automatic. This has lead to some of the cars being inconsistently focused (eg the nose of some cars is in focus while the side of the car is not).

The individual pictures with names like DSC00999.JPG were taken straight off of the camera. No alterations were made at all. These are 1024x768 in dimension, and each weigh in at about 350K. Since this camera writes to a large media receiver, the compression is not very aggressive and there is not too much artifaction. Generally speaking, these are also not very good pictures since they were among the first pictures ever taken with this new camera. Some of them are OK, but most of them could stand with being re-shot after I learn more about the camera and buy a tripod.

Update, September 2001: A couple of the pictures feature the cars pointing in the opposite direction; these pictures were shot on auto-white balance and using the flash for fill light. This brings out some spectacular reflections from the semi-gloss paper that I am using as a base/background. These pictures are generally speaking superior to those made using the previous method; see especially car 2001-143, the yellow SS Commodore VT.

Also, one of my good friends who knows far more about photography than I do has explained to me that the focal problems on the cars is due to the properties of the lense having to focus at such a short distance -- in other words, everything is working properly and I just have to be careful about how I stage each picture.

Individual pictures with sexy names like tn_DSC00999.JPG are thumbnail images, manufactured by feeding the output of djpeg into cjpeg in order to manufacture something that jpgtn could understand. Compression was done at -q 100 so there isn't too much in the way of image artifaction. The result is a 160x120 picture that weighs in at between 15K and 23K. Have a page with forty of these suckers on it and you can see why load times might start to be a problem.

Update, August 2002: the author of jpgtn, Jeremy Madea, dropped me a line back in June to let me know that he was releasing a new version of the utility for exactly the same reason that I was having to mess around with cjpeg/djpeg. I am always floored by how the free software community seems to work, and I can't say enough about how well jpgtn works. By removing two conversions from my image generation process, my website generation script now runs in less than a third of the time it used to take. My hat is off to Jeremy. My only regret is that I didn't look into the updated jpgtn sooner.

About Copyright

International copyright law is clear: I took these pictures, therefore their copyright resides with me. However, I hereby grant a credited, non-exclusive, noncommercial, self-hosted privilege of personal use to anyone interested.

What this means to me is that you may use any of these pictures providing you:

• credit me as the photographer;
• do not charge or make money from the use of these pictures; and
• host any pictures you use on the web on your own systems or systems with which you have made your own arrangements (ie, you may not reference pictures on my system from your own pages).

Feel free to provide a link to this page instead.

HotWheels and the HotWheels logo are trademarks and copyright by Mattel Inc. Logos, vehicle designs, and other information may be trademarks or copyright by various other entities.