Your EARLIEST image with a digital camera is....

bl0at3r

bl0at3r

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Recently been getting back into photography in general (and Lightroom) and was browsing through my old photos. I've got film photos I took as far back as the early 80s and 90s, but I thought it would be fun to show your earliest photos taken with a digital camera and the date taken....

Seems I had my first digital camera in 1998 and took some pictures of my mum's jewelry for insurance purposes, but my earliest snap was taken with a 2 megapixel monster (Kodak DC-280) on 09th June 1999 of a motorbike I had bought to restore....

DCP137 011.jpg

What is yours?
 
Only got a print - the file is/was on Dad's computer and he's no longer with us. It's of a Passiflora caerulaea flower that I had grown from seed, indeed, the plant is still growing outside our front door.
 
Nod said:
Only got a print - the file is/was on Dad's computer and he's no longer with us. It's of a Passiflora caerulaea flower that I had grown from seed, indeed, the plant is still growing outside our front door.
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What year do you think you took it Nod?
 
It was digital photography that taught me the need to back-up hard drives. I lost the first two years or so of my digital photography when my (unbacked-up) hard drive failed.
 
Couldn't possibly tell you what mine was, I'd imagine it was something out in the peak district.

I remember the first digital camera we had but can't remember the name... It looked something like but wasnt Nikon and was more streched.. Taller than it was wide I seem to remember .

9a4f712fd42f5180ccb5bba4a0e3556d.jpg
 
This was made with a Sony Vaio Picturebook in June 2000. It's not going to win any prizes for quality...

Woman using a laptop on train.jpg

By August 2000 I'd aquired a Nikon 990 (which I still have)...

Swindon train arriving.JPG
 
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I think mine was this. Not exactly the Pillars of Creation, but......... possibly a little different to most people's first digital image.

jwM16.jpg

Messier 16 aka the Eagle Nebula in Serpens from 2006. My partner and I bought a Canon 350D between us to do astrophotography. Prior to that I was doing it the hard way - manually guiding an exposure of up to an hour on 35mm slide film. The 350D has had the IR filter removed from the sensor since this pic and is still doing good work. I look back on this now as a pretty naff image but that's more to do with lack of exposure time, lack of any decent software and lack of knowledge.
It was 2011 when I made the move to digital for my other photography, although before that I had had a Panny digital point and shoot for those times I didn't want to lug an SLR/lens up a mountain.
The above is all a lie, of course, and the very first would have been a photo of one of the cats or a flower, just to check the camera worked, but I didn't keep it.
 
Late 90s we got a digital camcorder with USB outlet you could do stills too but they were only 480p.
It was very challenging getting it to communicate with Windows ME
Fortunately I don't think any of the grim stills from it are saved anywhere.
 
Hi, my first digital camera, bought 2003 :


minolta-tpDSC09179-a7z18c.jpg



minolta-tpDSC09178-a7z18c.jpg


minolta-tpDSC09180-a7z18c.jpg



A few from 2003, on the Ile de Re/F:

PICT0096+-tp.jpg



PICT0124+x_bearbeitet-1.jpg



PICT0129+-tp.jpg



PICT0250-tp.jpg



I threw away all my films, scanned all my slides and prints. Never analogue after that ... ---
 
I don’t expect anyone (hobbyist) to have taken an award winning picture with their first digital camera and I’m sure the motorbike I took wasn’t the very first snap as, like many others, I’m sure that was of the lens cap or something equally stupid.

What struck me is that for the last 20 years I have become so used to snapping away without a care in the world and discarding many more than I’ve kept that I’d almost forgotten that I used to take photos on film, be limited to 24 or 36 shots and having to wait for them to be developed to see if they were any good.

The younger generation will never have experienced that of course.
 
my first shots were on safari in kenya...

lion_resting.jpg

this was the first morning...so leo here gets the brass ring...
it was quite some years ago...
 
I don't have it - it was taken for work with a Sony Mavica FD5 though. None of your fancy memory cards for me - just whack in a 3½" floppy disk and you're ready to go. 640x480 in best mode. I think you could get 3 or 4 images on a disk (nearly 20 in 320x240 though)5989497286_0d8307b5a7.jpg
 
My first digital was a Fuji 602 pro zoom in 2003. I remember being pretty happy with the picture quality but being so frustrated with the responsiveness as it was so slow to focus it was for me effectively unusable for anything moving and even in full manual the zoom was painful.

Little Pip didn't mind posing :D

Picture 032.jpg
 
Don’t think I can access mine now taken on a digital ? Camera with no view screen .. went through a host of cameras at the end of the 90’s early 2000’s I remember 3mp was a big thing then , my first semi pro camera was the Sony f828 8mp bridge that had a swivel body took good stills and vids to then on to a canon 400d and ever upwards ..most early pics now lost as I also progressed through the computer systems dropping p.c’s in favour of macs around 2005 .. might be worth seeing how far back I can go on my external HD‘s one day.

Earliest shots on Flickr go back to feb 2000 taken on a Ricoh i500 the one that looked like a James Bond spy cam
 
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I don't think I have it anymore, but the first image on Facebook is probably with the same camera.
 
Nod said:
2001/2002. It was using Dad's Minolta DiMage 5. Still got it somewhere!
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I think mine was taken on a Dimage 7i in the very early 2000s too. It was probably at the Krugersdorp Game Reserve, just outside Johannesburg. I vaguely remember that it was a Ground Squirrel and the image is probably on an old back up drive somewhere.
 
My first digital camera was an Apple QuickTake 100. In 1998, I think. It took very small photos! I will have them somewhere on some kind of backup.
 
I borrowed a compact in around 2002 from a colleague... and my first image was thisdsc00043.JPG

It was at a Saab enthusiast meeting in September 2002, when the first 9-3SportSaloons were being imported and this is the first time we clapped our eyes on it, we checked everything... The red one is a CD, the black one next is a 9000 Carlsson, then a 900 Turbo 16S, and the 9-3 (2.0t Vector - most hundrum of the 4 but probably the most powerful except the Carlsson). Observers will note the Ferrari (Mondial or 308) - noone was interested in that, the owners were not happy his car was being ignored. The silver car behind the parked row, you can just see the roof, was my 1983 99GL which I loved.

I bided my time before buying - as Pentax hadn't launched any new DSLRs by that point - and bought a Canon G5 when it became available and then the *istD in 2005.
 
4wd said:
Late 90s we got a digital camcorder with USB outlet you could do stills too but they were only 480p.
It was very challenging getting it to communicate with Windows ME
Fortunately I don't think any of the grim stills from it are saved anywhere.
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Sounds very similar to my first couple of digital cameras - internal memory only & resolution so low a VGA monitor was more than was needed.
 
My very first digital image was in around 1986, I was teaching photography at a local college and they had an early digital camera. I found it fascinating, but wasn't tempted because of the image quality.

The first one that I bought was in 2000, pretty sure that it was an Olympus. It was a cracking camera for its time, but had a small sensor so limited in terms of image quality. It ran on 4x AA batteries and I only got about 20 shots per set of batteries.

What modern photographers may not realise is that costs of both cameras and storage were very high back then. This camera cost me £1500 (the competition was the 3mp Canon 30D (?) which cost £2000, body only, and the memory cards cost about £1 per mb . . . I bought a single 128mb card for £125.
The image quality was probably about on par with 35mm film, so very limited in terms of professional use but I remember my first big shoot with it, basically a fashion-type shoot for a workwear manufacturer and they were delighted with the results.

The shoot went well but was slow, because the memory card could only hold 9 shots, so each product ended up with just 9 shots, then we had to stop for coffee while I uploaded the shots to my computer. My assistant told me that he knew another photographer who had a microdrive, basically a non solid-state drive card that had 340 mb and that cost £340 - should he give him a ring and see if we could borrow it? We didn't get it, apparently the other guy had hoped to get the shoot and he wasn't happy . . .

My next digital camera was a Fuji S2Pro, at about the same cost, the image quality was much better but the camera was a bit of a nightmare to use, and very slow. I then bought the next model, the Fuji S3 Pro, which was a big improvement. Next up was the Kodak 14N, full frame and superb image quality at 80 ISO, but any shots taken at 400 ISO were terrible. This camera created very sharp images, mainly because it didn't have an anti-alias filter, but because of the terrible flare problems it could really only be used in the studio. I paid £5000 for it and then, a month out of warranty, the sensor failed and Kodak wanted £4000 for the repair, so I bought a Fuji S5 Pro. I then bought a Nikon D700 and a Nikon D3 and still use both of those. I still have most of my old digital cameras, they're in a box somewhere.

Those were the days, and I found that digital photography encouraged much more experimentation, but modern technology is so much better, cheaper and easier.
 
I used to have to take the odd picture at work and I can't remember what camera it was apart from it being a rather chunky compact. I used to collect it from the purchasing office as they kept it there with the batteries. As far as I remember it took AA's and we used Duracell batteries but even so they lasted no time at all. It was always a panic worrying if the batteries would last long enough and I gave up and brought my own camera in.
 
as a point of interest I dragged my photo above off of flickr and have re-processed it using LR+ PS+ topaz de-noise Ai quite amazing for a 3mp j.peg
back to the future by jeff and jan cohen, on Flickr
 
My first digital was a Canon G2. I can remember being in Sri Lanka in a taxi bouncing around on really bad roads doing 50 and I leaned out the window and snapped a guy on a moped. He had a huge basket on the back filled with live chickens, we are are not talking animal welfare here, the basket was rammed.
The picture was pin sharp, I was so impressed, that was the moment I bought into digital. I loved that camera.

However, that is the weakness of digital, I have no idea where or what happened to that File....
☹️
 
Garry Edwards said:
...

What modern photographers may not realise is that costs of both cameras and storage were very high back then. This camera cost me £1500 (the competition was the 3mp Canon 30D (?) which cost £2000, body only, and the memory cards cost about £1 per mb . . . I bought a single 128mb card for £125.
Click to expand...

That was the D30. The 30D came along in about 2008, and was 8MP. It's very dated by today's standards, but I still use mine and have never felt any real need to 'upgrade' it.

Does anyone remember the early digital cameras that used a 3.5" floppy disc? I think a disc had enough capacity for one shot...
 
hunnymonster said:
I don't have it - it was taken for work with a Sony Mavica FD5 though. None of your fancy memory cards for me - just whack in a 3½" floppy disk and you're ready to go. 640x480 in best mode. I think you could get 3 or 4 images on a disk (nearly 20 in 320x240 though)
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Same here, although a school project for me. 1998 I believe.
 
Unfortunately I don't have access to my very first digital images, but the first one I can lay my hands on is from 1998.

The camera was a Kodak Professional DCS 520 - it was a huge leap forward for DSLRs at the time, especially for press and sports work (image quality, preview screen, swappable storage, swappable batteries etc.). This franken-camera was a Canon EOS-1N film SLR with Kodak digital bits grafted on and cost around £10,000 (£17,700 corrected for inflation) for just 2MP.

front_view.jpeg

(Image linked from DPReview's review)


This unedited shot was taken on-board HMS Northumberland - it's straight from the camera: full resolution at 1728 × 1152 (also showing some dust on the anti-alias filter, this fragile in-camera filter cost £500 to replace so by minimising cleaning we reduced the risk of breaking it!).

00053117.jpg
 
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MartynK said:
Does anyone remember the early digital cameras that used a 3.5" floppy disc? I think a disc had enough capacity for one shot...
Click to expand...

hunnymonster said:
I don't have it - it was taken for work with a Sony Mavica FD5 though. None of your fancy memory cards for me - just whack in a 3½" floppy disk and you're ready to go. 640x480 in best mode. I think you could get 3 or 4 images on a disk (nearly 20 in 320x240 though)View attachment 281323
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State of the art!!!

I waited until there were enough pixels to get a decent resolution 7x5 print with a few to spare (about 3MP) then bought my first digital compact, a Coolpix 3100. Waited a few more years until there was an affordable Nikon DSLR (I had a reasonable selection of Nikon F mount (AF) lenses) and got a good deal on a D70 when the D70S was released. Almost went for a Canon D60 (IIRC) since it was already cheap enough to be affordable but didn't like the way it felt in my hands so waited for the Nikon to drop in price.
 
Some great posts in this thread - still amazes me how far cameras and digital pictures have come and in some cases how they haven’t changed what we take pictures of
 
Christmas 1999 - A picture of dad's car taken with the mighty 0.27mpx Kodak DC25. Not much likes opening the old K25 files these days.
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The camera didn't last all that long as I blew it up by using the wrong charger. (like all 13 year olds would) Side note, I still own the car 21 years later.
 
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