You might want to be sure that your picture are in sRGB before posting them on web...! As other color profiles are not read.
Personal screen calibration, or the lack of it, can bring different perceived gamma values (lighter or darker).

Apparent contrast differences between a paper copy and a slide (or here a retro-lighted picture) is a "classic"... And is resolved by some tweaking in the photo retouching software you use.

Anyhow, I don't find them too dark... They are great for my screen at least :-) And I find them great in themselves too :-)

I like those photo blogs, and miss a site tool for that, as in usual photo-blog sites. In ET it's the hard way (loading pictures to an external site, inserting link in text, etc...)!

Personal views of the different EU countries (as others) is a great idea, but I fear it would need a lot of server's space (and bandwidth)...

"What can I do, What can I write, Against the fall of Night". A.E. Housman