In December 1999, my dad bought me an HP C200 digital camera for Christmas. It was a pretty nice camera (1 megapixel) for the time, but it was digital--yuck! I decided to use it to take snaphots of me & my friends rock climbing. It would be easier to put the digital images on the web--do it directly with no scanning, etc.
Within a week I realized that this cheap little digital toy had the potential to change my life. Before long, I was back taking tons of photographs. Using my "digital darkroom," I was taking color pictures, converting them to black and white, and posting them on my web site. I used that cheap little digital camera until May 2003. The most important lesson learned was to not deride the camera but accept it's limitations, and in some cases even use them to my advantage.
In May 2003 I upgraded to a 5 megapixel Nikon 5700. After a few months getting used to it, I'm again able to shoot without thinking, without worrying about controls etc. If there's one word to describe my conversion to digital photography, it's freedom! No darkroom, no film. And my 5 megapixel images are crystal clear, not as clear as if they had been taken with a view camera but better than anything I ever did on 35mm film.
[ photograph above: Dana Point Headlands, 2001 ]
