January is usually the month when various websites and television media publish top 10 lists, and this January the media have focused on the last 10 years in the zeros. So I’ve decided to use the opportunity to tell you about my first 10 years of photography, especially digital.

Feel free to join in with your own experiences.

I’ve always been fascinated by pictures, especially portraits but for many years I lacked the equipment to pursue my dream of being able to take really good portraits. Around 95′ or 96′ I got myself an old Zenith camera for 10$ – but there were too many things I knew nothing about, for example the shutter speed actually can be too fast for the speedlight. So I burnt a lot of rolls of film on that account.

But in 2000 I got into the wonderful world of digital cameras, the family’s first camera was a Canon S10 at 2.11MP which we got as a wedding present in July 2000. I used the included 8MB Compact Flash card for 1½ years before upgrading to a 64MB, and looking back at it, it is a little annoying that at the time I knew so little about it that I actually prefered the amount of images on the Compact Flash card over the size of them.

At that time I had no problems in reducing the size to 800×600, instead of 1600×1200 to make room for more. Certainly not anything I could think of now where it should be as large as possible – and only in RAW.

Another thing that annoys me when looking back, is that I realized to late the value in having metadata in the images when it is taken, the focal length, whether or not the flash fired, etc. etc. The problem was that I used Canons program ZoomBrowser to download images from camera to computer. And if I had rotated the images in the camera, eg. rotated portraits instead of waiting till I imported them to my computer. But that method destroyed the metadata, but it took a couple of years before i realised that.

So in that period of time, I only have the metadata on half of my pictures, the other half lack the information.

The camera worked well until 2004 when it began to be somewhat unstable. There were some times you have to take the card out and put it in again. And the battery was beginning to act up, it was a NiMH battery and those have problems when they only are used half before charging. Not like the new kind that are able to handle that.

With a fully charged battery I could turn on the camera and take a few pictures then it went off again, so I bought some new batteries and the camera lasted about half a year more, finally the camera completely stopped working.

In September 2004 I bought a used Canon EOS 650 on Lauritz.com, again, I tried me with an analog SLR. And it was clearly better to have a camera which had no automation, rather than my old Zenith camera. But still, I didn’t think that I learned anything about taking pictures with the camera, at least not techincally. I shot a lot of rolls of film, but I didn’t get them developed right away, some times months before developing them. And then I could not remember how the camera was setup when taking the pictures.

But I think that most rolls of film have been developed.

Since our Canon S10 camera was busted, and we only had an analog camera in 2005, that I do not have so many pictures in digital form from 2005, only around 200 images, it has to.

Perhaps I should start scanning them.

Part two will follow in a couple of days.