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October 12, 2008

The Digital Realm and Digital Experience – A Ten Year Review

Filed under: Rants/Musings — cangione @ 1:23 am

I have a slide show widget that runs on my desktop side bar. The slide show gets pictures from the "My Pictures" folder which contains images from the last ten years. I was an early adopter of digital photography and bought my first digital camera on Guam before a trip deeper into the South Pacific.

Funny story. The first use of my new digital camera was to send pictures back to my company headquarters documenting the horrible shape the equipment we were working on was in! There had been a complaint from the customer about the extra money required to bring things back into operational shape. No more complaints once I sent in the pictures! I knew back then that digital photography would be a powerful medium!

One of those early pictures flashed across my screen tonight and I went to enlarge it. It was taken at a resolution of 640 x 480. Back then you were an advanced user if you were at 800 x 600 on a laptop screen and a picture at 640 x 480 looked pretty good!

When viewed on a modern laptop at 1280 x 800 that same picture looks grainy and like a postage stamp! It is amazing how fast the world has changed from film photography to digital.

Kwaj Sunset 1998
Kwaj Sunset 1998 @ 640 x 480 - 96 dpi

I wish I had my modern day digital camera 10 years ago. The color and depth of the pictures through several zooms now is amazing. I feel like I can crawl into the shots and look around. The shots I took ten years ago are a good test of my memory and imagination without zooming at all. To crawl into those shots and look around, I need to close my eyes and remember what it felt like to be there first hand.

Mount Wire 2008
Mount Wire 2008 @ 3072 x 2304 - 72 dpi

We are in the midst of an incredible revolution with digital High Definition photography and video. It takes the old photo album to a level where we can actually imagine we are there without leaving our living rooms.

I'm all for digital progress and photography yet believe there is something to be said for actually living outside the digital realm every once and awhile. I will cherish both the photos shown here because I was there in 1998 and 2008. For those that did not have these experiences, I still hope you enjoy the photos!

-C. Angione - 1998 & 2008

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