In Ballyvaughan village in Co. Clare, travellers have a choice – take the left to delve deeper into the Burren or take a right to take the coast road to Doolin and Fanore. Either way is a treat. At the junction is a well-stocked pair of signposts, and it just occurred to my this weekend that those signposts were one of the first things I photographed when I bought my first digital camera, back in 2003 (I had been using only film cameras until then).
Ballyvaughan signposts in Spring 2003. Notice that the older road signs were more useful than the newer ones, since they gave distance as well as the direction.
Ballyvaughan signposts in June 2015
The camera in question was fairly simple in terms of features (I’d got it in Argos)- it was a basic, compact model (a Konica Digital Revio KD-100) with a fixed-focus wideangle lens. The image quality wasn’t great to begin with,m and about 6 months after I bought it, either a sensor fault or a spec of dust caused every image to have a dark blob in the lower right hand corner (you can see it in the top image above). It didn’t matter – the immediacy of digital photography had me hooked, and by the end of the year, I had bought a much better camera – a Canon G3.
That first camera still works, and is still compatible with my computer. It takes a couple of AA batteries (though the camera eats through the battery power at a voracious rate), an SD card for storage and records the images as jpegs (you could record basic video too, but the quality was very poor). The G3 still works too, but that’s another story.