Let's have a coffee and talk cameras

When digital cameras first came along, not many people thought that they would mean the virtual end of film and all that rich history of analogue imaging that had lasted a hundred and fifty years.

The first digital camera I ever owned was a Logitech Fotoman. It cost me about $1000 Australian back in about 1991 - the dark ages before Windows 95. It produced tiny greyscale 150 kilobyte files with very low resolution. It was slow, cumbersome and extremely limited in what it could do.

For all that, it had opened the door to a brand new world.

The whole idea was that film didn't have to be processed into negatives and/or prints and then scanned into digital form where (after copious amounts of time trouble and expense) it could finally form part of a publishable layout. Instead, with Fotoman, I took the picture, sat the camera in its cradle, selected an image from the line of thumbnails which appeared on screen and dropped it into my (early version) Pagemaker layout.

Whoever or whatever was being promoted could be featured in an illustrated advertising flyer design (start to finish) within minutes. From the viewpoint of today it is sometimes difficult for people to understand (or remember) what a revolution that was.

Despite its potential, digital photography was to remain an expensive indulgence for several years yet. Back then, few people like me could believe that such devices would begin to threaten the very existence of film photography and the massive world-wide industry which supported it.

Of course all that is history now, but didn't it all come with a rush when it DID?! Yep, a fascinating topic. I'll have a soy milk cappucino please.

See my work at http://www.pbase.com/davidhobbs