This is the photo that caused me to take up photography as a hobby.
Being a gadget nut, I'd actually owned digital cameras since they first starting appearing on shelves in the high street stores. I had my first real job and I remember spending nearly a months wages on a fixed focus Fuji, and then only being able to take 8 photos at at a time because I couldn't afford the smartmedia memory card until the following month. Those photos were mainly of friends, and it was amazing to me as I didn't have to spend money at Boots after a night out, and get half my shots back with little stickers telling me how bad my photos were.
I kept that Fuji for years, eventually replacing it with a Sony Cybershot U-20. A tiny camera that I really could take anywhere. It had the smallest screen, a fixed focus and no controls except a shutter release - but it took a surprisingly good snapshot.
Then I got my first 'real' digital camera - a Kodak LS633. I'd picked it up cheaply in a sale. I didn't really know anything about it as a camera, but it had stuck in my mind for two reasons. First it was the first consumer product to use a OLED screen (as I said - gadget nut), and secondly it came with Mac software. Something that really was a rarity in those days.
I loved the screen, which was excellent and having a camera with zoom was a revelation. But most important of all was it produced these rich colour saturated images that made me feel like I was better then I really was.
Within a week of getting the camera, I was off on holiday with my friends. A real road trip down through France into Aquitaine, and staying in a villa around 40km from Bordeaux.
I got the bug bad that holiday, taking photos of everything in sight. A quick look in Lightroom shows nearly 900 images taken that week alone - I'd taken 550 in the entire two years previously.
On one of the days, we went into Bordeaux itself. Near where we parked they have this stunning war memorial. An angel atop a column, surrounded by fountains and marble statues. That is where this photo was taken. I remember 'chimping' at the screen and an being rather impressed with myself. I knew instantly it was the best photo I'd ever taken, and spent rather a long time that day trying to better it around Bordeaux.
It was the first time I really thought about framing a subject. A vast improvement on my previously snatched shots. When we got back to the villa I couldn't wait to see it on my iBook's screen. I didn't do any kind of processing then, I didn't really know how other then to stick the saturation levels up in iPhoto! But as I say, the bug was caught and I learned how to make improvements using a computer, and that over-saturation wasn't the answer to everything.
So this was the photo that lead to me buying a camera with a few more controls. Which lead to a camera that had manual controls. After a lot of experimentation, but a surprisingly short amount of time, that lead on to an SLR. After which the dizzying world of lenses, filters and speedlights came calling together with evenings sitting on the West Coast, listening to Terry Pratchett novels on my iPod just waiting for the sun to hit the horizon and hoping that that some colour will appear in the sky before it sets for the night.
Then the Sony
Even shrunken down you can see the difference, but click on the images to view size to see the real difference.
