Digital Photography -- Our Early Years!

DStanic wrote in post #13374832
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!

Haha I had that same camera as my first one. I always got a kick out of the low res burst mode.

After that camera I had a 2MP, full auto Nikon Coolpix 2100 which served me well for a fair few years. After that I moved on to a Panasonic DMC-TZ3 which made me catch the bug. After that it was all down hill for my wallet

I was in California visiting my family in January of '03 before my mom had the heart attack that led to her death that year.

I had my new digicam, and set out to get what I felt were shots of "interest":

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Your pics from back then had something in common with mine, Tony - everything right smack in the middle. Actually, mine were always like that until more recently than I care to admit...

Merovius wrote in post #13400894
Your pics from back then had something in common with mine, Tony - everything right smack in the middle. Actually, mine were always like that until more recently than I care to admit...

Yeah, I do tend to vary things more in recent years, sure. But I'm not a stickler about such things.

Truth be told I still struggle with composition a lot - more often than not I end up composing in Photoshop...

I did a little more digging in the digital attic. I'm not 100% certain, but I think this shot of a couple friends of mine was taken with my original Chinon ES-3000...which would mean this pic is original size...

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I was really enthusiastic in the early days, but...:

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Tony,

Nice thread. I had a similar one here: https://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthre​ad.php?t=721800 - but the focus was more on the evolution of my cameras, and less my photography.

I did manage to pull up a couple of shots from the early days. First was from a Kodak 6300, a 3.2 megapixel camera. It is a view of Austria from the peak of Zugspitze. It was actully quite spectacular to see, as those clouds rolled in from the horizon (taking about 5 minutes) they hit the far side of the hills in the foreground and literally exploded into the sky much like a wave at the beach would when crashing against the rocks.

The second picture here is from a Cajun music festival here in Long Beach, California. This was taken with the Olympus, which had a little tiny sensor which meant a little tiny aperture which meant everything is in focus. This is my first attempt at artificial lens blur. Using Photoshop Elements 2.0 is selected about four or five different distances from the subject and blurred them individually. At the time is quite proud of myself, but now looking at it, I am glad that I've invested in tools (both capture and after capture) they give me the depth of field control that I want.

So here is my camera list, and the shots.

Kodak 3600 P&S - 2.2 Million Pixel
Olympus - 5 Megapixel
Canon 10D - 6.3 Megapixel
Canon 400 DReb - 10.1 Megapixel
Canon G9 P&S - 12 Megapixel
Canon 5D - 12.7 Megapixel
Canon 5D Mk II - 22 Megapixel

Rad

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Rad, that mountain/cloud scene is pretty spectacular! Nice that you had your little old Kodak to capture the view!

You know, if you cloned those lines out, I imagine that would make a very nice print, if you haven't gotten one already. I've made some very presentable 12x16 prints from 4,5 and 6MP cameras -- framed and hung, they have always gotten a great response from people -- the fine details break down at really close inspection, but because they are images with a good visual impact, who cares? And that shot certainly does have a great visual impact!

I struggled with noise in trying to get nice sunset shots back with my early digicams, Like these two shots from Southern California trips in '03:

I'm with Tony on that mountain shot, Rad. If I had taken it it would definitely be on my wall.

When the light was good, those little digicams could always come through!:

Ya know, starting up and posting in this thread has gotten me started on a long-delayed task!

From the time I got my first digicam in late '02 'till the time I got my first DSLR, the 30D, in late '06, I have like 2,000 shots, and then things really picked up with the 30D. During those 3-4 years, I had no "organization" going on -- I had been using Photoshop Elements and done some keywording and such, but I was just tossing photos into "convenient" folders but without a way of approaching "Digital Asset Management" that could make long-term sense out of things.

In '07 I picked up Lightroom and also began to manage my images in a way that made more sense, and I'm glad I did because I was taking my photography more "seriously", meaning that I began taking more like 10,000 photos a year rather than 1,000...a lot more to keep track of!

Well, that's been working for the shooting I've been doing, but for all the old stuff, I've just left things where they were -- why put the work into things? But, whenever I do look back, I see the disorganization...and starting this thread has made me look at things, and now this past week I've actually started into things!

One thing is that I have all my older stuff in a Lightroom 1 catalog. I use LR3 for more recent years, but have yet to import photos from the earlier years, figuring that I'm pretty well "done with" them.

But now, looking over them all, I think that I'll get them all "in place", then I can load them all into my LR3 catalog, and then I can go back and re-process things when I get inspired instead of having to re-start LR1!!

Does that sound good, or do I just have too much time on my hands?!

Sounds like a grand idea to me. I have so many that need to be organized that I just look at them and say "Maybe later..."

Merovius wrote in post #13424175
Sounds like a grand idea to me. I have so many that need to be organized that I just look at them and say "Maybe later..."

Well, it's something! While processing a single shoot, and getting it "in place", can be reasonably quick (many shared keywords for example), it's a whole different matter to take on hundreds of shoots, to relocate them, often name the images, keyword them, put them in collections, etc...!