My family got a relatively early start on the digital camera age. There are 900×1200 photos taken from 2000 and 2001, although we mostly used film at the time.
The first photos I took specifically for a website date to June 2001, and are also film. This was concurrent with learning that Wal-Mart had an option to order CDs with digital versions of the film rolls. The first digital pictures came a few months later. I was able to use one of our film cards to take about 75 pictures during the Independence Bowl trip — my first digital pictures outside Iowa.
This July, I took my 20,000th picture for the archive. With this being 11 years since I began Iowa Highway Ends, it’s time to take a look back. Below are scaled versions of the original photos taken at numerical milestones.
Photo #1000: County Road C47 (old IA 72) at I-35, Sept. 13, 2002
Photo #2500: Beeds Lake State Park (end of old IA 134), Sept. 5, 2003. This is from the “bad camera” era.
In 2004, I got a laptop with iPhoto on it. The keyword function alone made importing my by-now-thousands of photos worth it. My homemade version of folder numbering and dating was not quite obsolete, though, as it would make a good repository for originals I didn’t want to destroy, but didn’t want to put “into the system.” So really, the number in the title is the number I’ve kept, and doesn’t include out-of-focus versions or duplicates. (Unfortunately, it seems that I keep taking more and more shots that are just enough out of focus to notice, but not enough to trash.)
Photo #5000: County Road F20 (old IA 301) at I-29, May 7, 2006
(To be continued later)