aucontrary

I’ve been using digital cameras for a long time. In the beginning, the quality wasn’t the best. My wife wasn’t totally impressed with the quality, but I liked the convenience and the easy way to keep my pictures backed up. So, for a while, we each had a camera and took our own pictures with our own camera. My daughter probably felt like she was being chased by Paparazzi. (Or she would have if she hadn’t been so young.)

Luckily, back in those days, we were using an Advantix camera, so I was able to eventually get them all converted to digital. But even then, the quality wasn’t the greatest.

Back when I started using a digital camera, everyone I know had shoeboxes, albums, plastic totes, cardboard boxes full of pictures. My mom had hers in a giant, wooden trunk. Going through these was always a chore and there were loose negatives in the little envelopes, it was chaos. Even when people took the time to put them into albums, they sat on the shelf collecting dust. I took my digital pictures and I put them online. Initially, I was using different tools to create static album pages for my web site and then, I started using IDS, (Image Display System) CGI written in Perl that interactively generates a photo album website. Then I started using Michael Mulligan’s myPhoto (I don’t think it’s around anymore, but there is an article about it here.) to generate web albums directly from iPhoto.

What I found was that maintaining these albums was a fair amount of work, and no one ever really looked at them that way. But, having them digital was still way better than having them in a box or on a shelf or in an envelope. I have created several phot DVD’s and albums for special occasions using these pictures. I can have them as the screensaver on my TV and my computers. When iPhoto added facial recognition, I started creating albums for special occasions. When it was my daughter’s birthday, I would have a screensaver that used pictures of her over the years. I am able to have a lot of fun with the pictures.

I also have more control over the security of my pictures. With prints, if something happens to the box where your pictures and negatives are, you lose everything. Over the years, I have used many different techniques to back them up to ensure that I would not lose them if there was a fire or other issue at my house. Initially, it was burn them to CD and put them in a safe deposit box. Then I copied them to a hard drive that I kept at a friend’s house. Then I synched them to a drive at my friends house over the internet. Now, they are in iCloud and also stored in another off-site backup system. As well as several local backups. [See my Ultra-Paranoid Backup Strategy.]

As I thought about this, I went back and looked at my pictures. Thanks to Exif data, (and the way I catalogged the picures) I was able to reconstruct my digital camera history:

Camera: HP Photosmart C200
Purchased: October 1999
Resolution: 1152 x 872 (1 megapixel)
Pictures: 1,239
Videos: N/A
First Picture I took:

Camera: HP Photsmart 315
Purchased: November 2000
Resolution: 1600 x 1200 (1.9 megapixels)
Pictures: 1,564
Videos: N/A
First Picture I took:

Camera: Kodak DX4900
Purchased: May 2002
Resolution: 2448 x 1632 (4 megapixels)
Pictures: 1,560
Videos: N/A
First Picture I took:

Camera: Canon Powershot S400
Purchased: June 2003
Resolution: 2272 x 1704
Pictures: 4,517
Videos: 721
First Picture I took:

Camera: Canon Powershot SD630
Purchased: November 2006
Resolution: 2816 X 2112 (6 Megapixels)
Pictures: 1437
Videos: 124
First Picture I took:

Camera: Panasonic Lumix DMC-TS10 (Waterproof Camera)
Purchased: December 2004
Resolution: 4320 x 3240
Pictures: 1662
Videos: 88
First Picture I took:

Camera: Canon Powershot sX10IS
Purchased: June 2009
Resolution: 3648 x 2736 (10 Megapixels)
Pictures: 7,303
Videos: 186
First Picture I took:

Total for all cameras:
Pictures: 19,282
Videos: 1,119