Twenty One Years of Digital!

 This month, April 2022, marks twenty one years since I bought my first digital camera! I still have it: a 3mp Kodak DC4800. It was a fabulous camera for the time-a point and shoot with a zoom lens and a bunch of available accessories, such as a fisheye lens. At the time, 3 mega pixels was a very high resolution picture indeed! VGA cameras were still the norm for consumer level digital and social media was still a thing of the future. Sharing digital photos online was not the obsession it is today so digital photography was simply a (poor) substitute for film photography.

My first digital camera was quite expensive-over $400 in 2001. I was looking for more control over my photography after the drug store had messed up my prints one time too many. I took the camera everywhere-the ability to change "ISO" or "film speed" on the fly was a game changer. The only problem was, now I had to up my computer skills! I bought the first version of Photoshop Elements and started the process of teaching myself to be computer literate on our shared home computer. By November 2002, I had my own computer and my skills in both photography and computers improved swiftly. My Canon 5dMkIV is my seventh digital and lightyears away from that first camera! 

Digital photography is an ever-evolving field. My current cell phone takes far better pictures than those early digital cameras and I know a lot of people who never use anything else to take photos. It is said that the best camera for the job is the one you have with you and that certainly applies to cell phone cameras. However, they have their limits, and however good they are, the pictures they take are designed to exist online. From tiny sensors, to sharpening software and wide angle lenses, there are a multitude of reasons not to use a cell phone to record an important milestone. I have been hired to take photos at family events, such as birthday parties and anniversaries, and I have been hired to fix pictures of an anniversary party taken with a cell phone. The cost is not so different! 

So, remember to save those cell phone pictures somewhere other than Facebook and take the time to have family photos taken by someone who knows how to use a camera. Photographs hold our memories; when children are grown and loved ones are gone, the photos taken of them become some of our most valuable possessions.