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

Interestingly, I've been scaling down the past years - earlier, I'd take grand journeys with my then-girlfriend. Even while they were a learning experience, made for many fun pictures for my grandparents and I wouldn't be in SA right now without them, they made me feel stupid to not know much about my own continent. The past three years I found I also take enormous enjoyment in making small scale trips - I don't need to go 5.000 kilometers before I am happy to be Somewhere Else. And now that I will only visit Europe as a visitor - I really need to pick my destinations with care...

I think there are many people at this forum who would be equally justified to take the same call sign. This is European Tribune, but if you'd relabel it to Expatriate Tribune, I'd not be surprised to see many of the active participants stick around.

The Story Behind The Name:
Interestingly, I picked my tag because I was moving from computer to computer all the time in my graduation period (perhaps deceptively boosting ET's unique visitors?). It would happen I would frequent ET from 4 different computers as I passed through the day. This was in the year I was graduating and it may have been the least exciting period (travel wise) in 10 years. (The Chill Out Tour was done straight after I received my degree.)

Enough! Enough!