One to Ten Thousand

I have now taken over 10,000 digitals images with my Nikon D40X. For someone who has been taking pictures for 50+ years this is weird. In the 60's a busy day for me might have been 4 or 5 rolls of 35mm-36exposure Tri-X film. The day wasn't over by a long shot. Back to the photolab to process the film, make contact sheets and then try to decide what if anything should be printed. With digital it's shoot and back to the computer, where-ever it may be, and load the images into the computer and then decide what gets put up on the blog. If it takes 1 hour in the digital world it probably took 8 hours in the analog world.

Do I want to go back? No. But I do miss black-and-white photography. I still have my 35mm cameras but no darkroom. If and when I can set up another darkroom and Tri-X is still sold then I will get back to b&w photography. But it will never again be my primary source for photos, that duty has been taken over by the digital camera.

The camera, a Nikon D40X, with a 18-70mm zoom was purchased the day photo one was taken, August 16, 2007. The camera was cleaned by Nikon once. This was required because of user stupidy. I have had absolutly no problems other than keeping the photo-cell clean and that was operator error. Since the camera was cleaned on December 1, 2007, I have had only one spec of dust and that was removed and since then nothing.

I do have one big grip with Nikon and you can read about it here.

Below is number one, the Laguna Beach lifeguard tower, and number ten thousand, the tide-pools flooded at high tide. The hardest part of taking both pictures was keeping the horizon level. Both photographs are complete and unedited. No cropping.

If you want to view my old analog camera work then visit http://www.photoessayist.com/. I'm especially proud of the work I did in Vietnam while serving with the Marines.