Walter Hutchens’ Blog

The fist digital camera I owned was a Nikon CoolPix 990. It was a 3-megapixel camera and cost about $900. I adored it. Or, rather, I adored the things it let me do. I bought it at a store called the Whiz in Jersey City, New Jersey right after my daughter was born in August 2000. My brother David accompanied me on the shopping spree (I bought my first Windows-based computer then, too—a small Sony notebook).

I used that camera to take the first pictures of my daughter. I also took pictures of my parents and brother visiting when she was born, their first trips to New York City.

That year I lived on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River in a development called Newport. I took many pictures of family and friends along the river, the twin towers of the World Trade Center dominating the background. None of us imagined the horror that would erase those buildings on 9-11. Those pictures trigger memories and emotions far different from any I expected to capture. Photography’s power can manifest itself in unexpected, disturbing ways.

Five years later an equivalent camera (at least in terms of megapixels) costs less than $200. But I’ve never regretted getting that Nikon. I only regret that I didn’t immediately buy a high-capacity memory card to replace the low-capacity one that came with the camera.

Besides expense, that camera’s main drawback was its slowness. It was sluggish to start up then slow to recover between pictures. It was also a bit bulky by today’s standards, but at the time pocket cameras weren’t common and the size didn’t bother me.

I fell in love with digital photography. The experience is profoundly different than shooting with film. It feels like a radically different activity, not merely a different means to accomplish the same task.

With film I shot rarely. Now I love taking pictures and consider photography a hobby.

With film I paid to develop hundreds of bad images (because of course you cannot know they are bad until they are printed).

Also, with film I almost never got around to enlarging or duplicating my few lucky good shots. Now I routinely share pictures with others. With film you had to go to a shop to develop photos, then go back to the store to pick up the prints, then make another round trip for enlargements or reprints, then mail those to people. There’s nothing hard about any of that, but those steps taxed my time and attention just enough so that I rarely actually did it. With digital photography I can instantly see the images, retouch, re-size, reprint and electronically distribute them.

Since discovering digital photography the number of shots I take has exploded, and now I routinely share pictures with others by email (or in some cases by printing and mailing them).

I’m keeping online photo albums as my daughter grows up.

Next in 2002 I bought a very similar camera—a Nikon CoolPix 4500. I got it because I irreparably damaged the CoolPix 990 attempting a DIY repair of some little problem. By then the price had dropped—$700 for four megapixels. I chronicled more of my daughter’s growth with that camera.

Then in 2004 I bought a tiny Pentax Optio 5si. By then five megapixels cost only $300! And the camera could fit in my shirt pocket. Partly because of the portability of that tiny Pentax, partly because I found some tools like Picasa and PhotoStory that make it very easy to share pictures (via email, the web and slideshows), partly because of some travel I did in 2005 and partly because I am a creative and a sentimental sap, after I got that camera the number of pictures I took again exploded.

Next in 2005 I bought a Nikon D70s, my first digital SLR (actually, my first SLR of any kind, film or digital). It’s fantastic. It costs somewhat more than my first digital camera in 2000, but it does much, much more. It’s fast, which is important when you have a restless child to photograph. All the previous digital cameras I owned were sluggish—slow to start, slow to recover between shots. DSLRs don’t have that problem. The D70s isn’t tiny, but I’ve found new joy in photography with it.

Last year I got my first phones with built-in cameras. I also tried adding a camera to a PDA. None of these devices offered great image quality, but it’s nice to have even a low-end camera with you at all times. A camera phone is sometimes a handy way to take “notes” or capture something unexpected.

In action movies you sometimes see a character pull out a hidden gun after a weapon is knocked away. I sometimes chuckle at myself for being similarly equipped. Like a tourist from hell, I’m armed with multiple backup cameras—if the DSLR fails I’ll go to the pocket camera; if that one is kaput I’ll fall back to the camera phone.

I cannot recall all the computers I’ve ever owned. (I do remember all the Windows-based PCs I’ve had. That list didn’t begin until August 2000, in conjunction with my first digital camera purchase as described above. But the much longer list of Macs I’ve used is lost in the mists of time.) My experience with digital photography is shorter, the memories fresher. Recording the succession of cameras I’ve had will allow me to keep from losing the thread as I have with computers. Plus, it’s just nice to reflect on these devices and my experiences with them. I have good memories—and some treasured photos—from each of them.