Digital Photography -- Our Early Years!

Hey, gang!

Sometimes I find one reason or another to go "back"...normally it will tend to be to some shoot from one of my DSLRs, and from when enough time had gone by that I actually had done what I could call "shoots", not just random shots of whatever.

But occasionally I find my self going farther, back to when I was trying to "learn" using a variety of Point and Shoots and "advanced super-zoom" compact digitals.

Recently my curiosity got tweaked, and I went back to the earliest digital shots I have.

I had gone for some time without taking any film photos -- my "35mm film super zoom P&S", which I had really enjoyed, had died maybe in the late '90s, and using the little disposable film cameras was a drag, and besides, I was never really enthused about the whole process of developing and working with print labs and all the guesswork of shooting film.

Then, my company loaned me a digicam to take home for the Christmas, '01 break. Well, evidently I didn't really have a feel for working with one of these cameras! I only have two existing shots from it.

A family snapshot from New Years' Eve '01 (actually past 1 AM Jan 1 '02):

I will say that I did like to "try things" with that first Dec. '02 digicam:

Those HP cams seemed popular in the early days. My sister bought my parents a fixed-lens HP for xmas a few years ago take horrible pictures I think I should find them a better camera, even a 2mp Canon does a way better job!

My first digital cam was some ultra cheap "Cool-i-Cam" with internal memory and used 2 AAA batteries. It only had a little LCD on the back that showed the remaining shots left. I think it was VGA resolution, quite terrible! Then I got a used Samsumg 2mp P&S which was not bad, but not great either, and then i got a used Canon S200 ELPH 2mp which was a pretty good camera and I still have it kicking around somewhere. In the early days once you got into the 2mp cameras that had a decent lens on them they took acceptable snapshots and made good 4x6 or even 5x8 prints.

My first digital camera was an Epson 3000, 3MP and super lag time, but I got some good stuff.
I liked it because it looked like a slr and it had a 'Hot Shoe'.

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More from the Archives!

When friends showed up, it was time to snap photos!

These three were right about Christmas '02 with that first HP digicam.

Allahna:

Funny looking at things and realize the composure mistakes I made in those early days!

'Course these days I'm painfully aware of my mistakes as soon as I get home and download the shots!

This one was from my second digital (the first was really more for the family):

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Ben, it's nice that you could get a shot like that!

I see it's from '06...at some point I'll get there in my archives -- I'd begun shooting with the 30D at the end of '06!

Hey folks, feel free to post some more!

I have a stack of floppy disks loaded with (about 20) pictures each from our Sony Mavica that was a whopping (sit down) 1 megapix. I know that was a big deal because there's a huge sticker on it saying it's 1 megapixel. It also had image stabilization and video. Plus, it was only the size of a breadbox.

What a great camera. I'm going to have to find a way to get those pictures downloaded.

I also have my first video camera since becoming a father 12 years ago. It's about the size of my dslr camera bag.


But just wait. Someday our grandkids will say, "what's a Gigabyte? What's a terabyte?" The terabyte will someday be for the grandkids what a K is to us.


Oh, the future.

I see a time in which we have tiny devices attached to our hats the size of a button, and they will wirelessly scan our retinas, process it, and send it to the cloud, all in realtime, hdr, 3d, and probably sound and smell as well.


Or maybe we'll all just go back to film.

One of the first digital images I took was using a 0.3 megapixel Sony digital camera that used floppy disks to store the image files. That was 13th July 2001.

The subject matter of the photograph was an old shirt sleeve that I had discovered in a lay-by, and I have a photograph of it hanging off the end of the stick that I used to tentatively pick it up. I don't think I'll bother posting that photograph though.

Another photograph in the set is a rear view of one of my friends performing a Manneken Pis tribute in the same lay-by. I had better not post that one either!

There you are - fashion and glamour, all in one session!

Mike

My first digital camera was a Kodak DC-280 2mp, purchased on 12-27-99 for $799.99, along with a Sandisk 128mb Compact Flash Card for $149.99 !!!!

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Neat stuff. I wished that I had kept some of the first shots that came from the first digital that I had. I can only remember that it was a Sony and it took at 2.5" diskette and you got all of about 8-10 shots on it. I thought I was in heaven for taking shots of the kids and stuff but it was never good enough for anything commercially. I didn't last too long before it was dropped and broken and too damn expensive to repair so I went without a digital for a few more years when my wife bought me a Nikon Coolscan that was 4.3 MP. I printed some 8x10's out of that camera that were actually excellent. From there it was on to Canon and the rest is history.

Kirk, that little old thing took some very nice shots in your hands!

Guys, it's sad that so many of these things ended up on floppies and such! I have to go more thoroughly through my archives to see how much "stuff" I rescued from those days, but at least since all my digicams used memory cards, a good number of them have made it into the library!

Bring 'em on -- this is a fun thread!

My grandson Israel turned 10 in '02. He became one of my favorite "models" with my new digicam:

This was, of course, using the dang pop-up flash:

After I read this post I started digging through the archives looking for the really old stuff. My first digital was a Chinon ES-3000 back in 1995 (I think I still have it), but the pictures were so hideous and it was such a PITA to get pics off of that I didn't use it much. I got a Kodak DC-210 in '98, and it was better, but it didn't hold my interest either. It wasn't until I got my DC280 in 2000 that I really got into it. I actually took some reasonably decent shots with it...now if I can just find them...