ABSTRACT
Introduction I first encountered a DSLR when I was working in London in 1993. It was the Kodak DCS100 - the first totally portable Digital Camera System (DCS) that had been released in 1991. It had a 1.3-megapixel sensor mounted in a largely unmodified Nikon F3 SLR body that had a restricted viewfinder, no memory card (just a hard drive that used to get hot) and the image had to be downloaded via an umbilical cord to a separate digital storage unit (DSU) that had a 4-inch black and white monitor. The DSU was about the size and weight of a large camera bag that could be mounted on your belt. Having said all that I was hooked on the very first image that I captured with this beast. I shot a press image with the camera and after glancing at the monitor I realized I had the image in the bag (so to speak) with the very first shot. It felt very, very strange walking away without shooting the other 35 frames and winding off the film. Although I had seen the future - it remained just that for many years. The camera was a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster (Kodak digital technology bolted into a Nikon film camera), cost the same as a new family car and the low pixel count made it easy not to invest any personal money into digital capture at that point in time.
