First and Last

Its all digital these days. We watch digital television, listen to digital radio, I even read digital books. We take digital pictures as well. I resisted buying a digital camera for several years, and as an alternative I took pictures on Fuji Provia and Velvia slide film and scanned them into the computer. This was a long and painful process compared to the instant gratification of a digital camera with a tiny screen on the back. Thus it was 2003 before I finally accepted that digital cameras were good enough and these pictures are from that changover year.

This first picture (scanned the new way) is from my last slide film, a holiday in Wales. I recall it rained and the slides are dull and unremarkable. Thus my era of analogue images passed with a whimper.

Here's a bright and brash picture from the new digital age. Unfortunately my first digicam (the Fuji S2800, a 2M pixel thing) was a poor substitute for old fashioned film. It was however a great deal faster. 

Instant results! In those days an image took up three quarters of a megabyte of disk. These days each time I press the shutter I put two images on my memory card with a total of about 20 megabytes.

Here we are in the autumn of that same year. The lure of the dark side and the urge for better quality pictures has already drawn me to a better camera. This picture from my new Fuji S602 starts to hint of improved sharpness and colour quality.

These days I have to admit that DSLR results are better than film. Modern computer designed lenses are far better than anything I used to use, and there is generally less noise in a modern digital image that grain in an old film image.

All this change in eight years....