My first digital camera was something I helped build in the mid-1980s - it involved an analogue TV camera, a monstrously expensive digitising framestore and a computer (a BBC Micro). The 'camera' was good for capturing electron diffraction patterns, but not really much good for anything else - and the images were 512 x 512 pixels. You also needed a pretty robust trolley to move it around and mains electricity. There's an entire PhD thesis somewhere at the University of Bristol if you want to know more.
My second digital camera was about 20 years later, in November 2004 - when I finally bought a compact (and portable) digital camera. Although the images weren't, with hindsight, that much bigger than the 1980s ones they were at least in colour. I was also, in a rather nerdish way, intrigued by the extra information that came attached to each image such as date and time alongside the image information such as exposure time and aperture setting. This metadata lured me into being rather more interested in thinking about the pictures I was taking - and generally into becoming a better photographer.
The first step in this was to be one year project to try and find (and take) a digital image every day. And the rest, as they say, is terabytes.
The original plan was to take a picture everyday during 2005, but I started early - on 24th December 2004, looking out of my office window at the Open University in Milton Keynes.
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| Picture #1, 24 December 2004 |
Somehow, I just haven't yet managed to stop.
Today marks the completion of 15 years taking at least one digital photograph each day. During the first year, I posted pictures here, then for a few years they mostly just stayed on various computer hard discs, and since July 2010 the images have been posted on Blipfoto usually with a short diary entry saying something about the picture.
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| Picture #5478, 23 December 2019 |
Tomorrow I fully expect to take picture of the day 5479 - as I start year 16 of my 'one year project'.
I might well be a rubbish diarist (in the traditional sense), but I think I'm getting the hang of the photo-blogging malarkey.
For anyone that's checking the maths - 365 x 15 is 5475, and there have been three February 29ths to confuse the numbers.
And, yes. I do still worry about happens if I get round to crossing the International Date Line.
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