Photos

My interest for "taking pictures" - as we say in Danish - started in spring 1963, where I was awarded an AFS-scholarship. I bought my first camera - a japanese model Olympus Pen for the neat price of 180Dkr (I forgot the exchange rate then, could it be 10 kroner on 1 dollar?). And then I started shooting photos of my home town in order to get a print or - wait a minute - dias-slide, so I could bring it with me to the US.
Already back then I "dared to be different" as was to become my motto taken from the Class of '64 at Dickinson High School, ND - I had bought a camera, that was efficient, eg. it stored two pictures in the space of on: 18x24mm times 2 makes 36x24mm, right?
From then off I have been at war with doing things normally - and it has brought me a lot of trouble ever since. To make prints or dias out of a film with 18x24mm negatives, that was not easy - normally I just got two pictures in one fram ;-)
Nevertheless - it was a good investment, since I still have the original negatives. And with moderne digital technology coming around, it has been a pleasure to convert the old negatives to digital images, which I can then export for various purposes.
The Olympus camera lasted for a long time, but it was converted to a Nikon camera once I got married, and my wife and I traded: She got a fur coat and I got a camera !! - I don't remember, how we got the money, maybe we were not paying mortgages at that time ... It was a used camera though with a standard 50mm lens, and I later bought a fine 105mm portrait lens, that took great portraits.
At that time I rented a room in a rich man's house, and I got access to a dark room, where I could develop my black/white negatives - what a treat in the late 60'ies. Because: It was expensive to buy film and get it developed - and even worse: To get prints - I remember, that one simple copy 10x15cm or so cost about 3 kr. - so I only got prints out of the most important pictures and kept the negatives for better futures ...
Another fine aspect at that time was photo albums - of which a made quite a few with beautiful annotations. Just like young people would make a blog today with the finest art work to illustrate their views. I still have the latest addition from around 1984, which is - empty! I don't recall what happened, I guess the children got too old to photograph and store in albums, but I do recall, that I all of a sudden changed to dias, maybe because I thought they were easier to keep in good order - what a fatal mistake!!
Eventually also the dias have been re-mastered and converted to digital images, but the annotations were missing and just think, that you dropped a dias-cassette with 100 pictues - what a mess to restore the order.
It all continued that way until 1999 in august, where my American family came visiting - and John brought his first digital camera. Was that an adventure to watch him operate this little thing! I should mention, that back in 1990 I got hold of a video camera - and that really cost me a lot of time, so it was almost only in vacations, that I continued to use my wife's camera - a Canon from the Olympics in Moscows /what year was that?/. But videos are another story ...
I got hold of a digital camera via my work, because at that time, I had quit being technical director of information technology/IT - and had focused on ... photography with special emphasis on digital video (here we go again ...!). No - we bought an expensive Sony camera, and off I went shooting everything and everybody for the next two years. What a fantastic feeling it was to be free of negatives, of development and prints and what have you! Just connect the camera to the computer, and voilá: The finest photos came rolling in.
To cut a long story short, I got yet another camera - a Canon Powerhot G3 in connection with being webmaster for a local football club, and with it I added another 25.000 photos to my growing collection. Unfortunately it was stolen while on vacation in Milano, Italy - and it took me almost a whole year to decide on buying my own digital camera: The very first one - which became a Samsung NV100HD - because it was tiny and I like to take photos/video of performances like open air concerts, operas and other things, where you are not allowed to use a camera.
Now I have a problem: How to find 10 of my best photos from the vast collection and put them right here for your convenience ...