Tenth time ’round the clock
Owners of high-mileage automobiles know that there is a certain magic about seeing your clock tick over from 99,999 miles to zero. As if your old 100,000 mile warrior is brand new again. A quick check reveals that there’s no such luck: The rust is still there. That passenger door is still dented. The engine still makes that weird rattle at 56.2 miles per hour. But there’s something very satisfying about it as well. You learn the quirks and niggles of your motor, and it means that you are the only person who can drive it properly.
The same thing goes for digital cameras. I was just downloading some photos off my 30D, and discovered that I had gone around the clock yet again. That marks the fact that I’ve taken 100,000 photos with my cameras over the past five years or so.
The first digital SLR I had was the first ‘real’ consumer-grade dSLR: the Canon D60. The D30 deserves a mention of honour, but at only 3 mpx, it just didn’t quite make the grade. It went from IMG_9999 to IMG_0001 less than 4 months after I bought it in 2001. After that, I’ve owned a Canon EOS 300, a Canon EOS 10D, an EOS 20D, and my current ‘main’ camera is a Canon 30D. Between all the cameras, I’ve now taken 100,000 photos.
I’ts a sad though, really — If I had taken all of those photos on 135 film, it would have been 2,778 rolls of film. That’s about 3.9 km of film.
Sadly, around 99% of those 100,000 photos were terrible. Stuff was out of focus, had bad contrast, was over- or under-exposed, or just plain bad ideas to begin with. Nevertheless, even with a 0.5% hit rate, it means I’ve now got around 500 great photos sitting in my photo library. And that’s something to be proud of, I feel.
So. A hundred thousand photos over six years. That’s about 1,400 photos per month on average. I think that calls for a poll…
How many photos do you take per month?
Did you like this post? Stay in touch!
If you liked this post, why not stay in touch with Photocritic going forward?
I'm on Flickr and Twitter, or you could add my RSS feed to your favourite feed reader. Or, if you don't fancy doing any of that, drop us a comment below; you can be anonymous if you want to, but if you add a link to your blog or similar, I'll promise I'll come have a look!
Insights, suggestions and comments
Hi, wrong poll here…. :)
Sendermen: Do’h! Fixed. Thanks for the heads-up!
Welcome!
I recently found out that my Rebel took over 60k photos. I calculated some numbers, meaning I have taken around 90 photos a day over the last 2 years. I honestly am not aware of that…
I’ve had my 350D since April 2006. I’ve taken about 9000 pictures with it already. This means that the magical clocking thing will happen soonish. I had not thought about this before - I guess I didn’t actually know what happened when you got past 9999 - but I am now massively overexcited about this. I was equally excited when my car got to 22222 and pulled over into a lay-by to photograph it, but annoyingly by the time I actually stopped the display said 22223. I was gutted. Oh dear. I should get out more.
I had to vote none because I’m still camera less, IT people in education get heavily shafted, so I don’t shoot anything. I’m also miffed at the seemigly “elite camra” culture but thats a article in its self. I remember with my last camera I was always snapping photos and my family thought something was wrong if it wasn’t with me. I’d snap around 900 to 1k of photos a month, most of them garbage or burst photos of action, experimentation, but I loved them all and can’t wait to get back to it.
wow. Just had a look at it. about 500 a month. I didnt realized I shot so much.
in the two months I’ve had my camera I have shot nearly 13,000 shots.
Matt; that’s about 216 pictures a day! How do you find the time? And, what on earth are you taking pictures of?
Unless of course you’re a professional photographer. That would explain both of these things :)
Share your wisdom