I have been a photography buff for many years. When I first started college, I studied photography. After losing easy access to a darkroom, my passion gradually subsided. For a little while, I sustained it by using the Chula Vista Library's darkroom, and I hauled a box of chemicals back and forth. Eventually, my passion for computer programming overwhelmed my passion for photography, but it was always lurking just under the surface.
I always dreamed of being able to put a darkroom in my home. About the time that became remotely possible ("Hey, that closet under the stairs is about the right size for a tiny darkroom!"), something else happened: digital cameras reached the point where they produced adequate pictures, and my computer became the darkroom (minus the smelly chemicals).
I had the good fortune to work with digital cameras at the dawn of their popularity explosion. I started working on the "Windows NT Shell Team" at Microsoft in September 1997. About a week after I started, my boss plopped the oddly shaped DC120 on my desk, and said, "See if you can get the pictures off that camera."
Using Kodak's SDK, I wrote a little program that enumerated the images and copied them to your hard drive. I turned this over to someone else (I started concentrating on scanners), and it became the basis for the first prototype of the shell extension in WindowsME and WindowsXP that shows you a view of your camera's contents.
For the next few years, I worked on this team, producing software for digital cameras and scanners. The software we wrote came to be called WIA (Windows Image Acquisition). During this time, I used a succession of cameras, including the Kodak DC210, Kodak DC220, Kodak DC260, and Kodak DC290. I mostly used Kodak cameras, because they were an early Microsoft partner for WIA. When we got the first DC220, with Flashpoint's Digita OS and USB connection, we fought over it. I don't think that camera was idle on most weekends. However, I wasn't ready to buy my own camera yet, because they were just too expensive and the quality was still just too low.
In July, 2000, I was preparing to go on vacation, and I needed a digital camera. Nikon's newly released 3.3 megapixel Nikon Coolpix 990 became available. Almost on a whim, I snatched it up, and immediately fell in love with it. Between July 2000 and July 2002, I took more than 17,000 photos with it.
In July 2002, I bought the Nikon D100, the second "prosumer" digital camera (after Canon's D30). I absolutely adore this camera. So far, I have taken almost 30,000 photos with it (28,968 as I write this). Today I am using the Nikon D2x, which I adore.
I still work at Microsoft, on the DMX (Digital Media Experience) team, where I get to design and create software to make digital cameras even more fun in the future.
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| Shaun Ivory, Self Portrait |