Afterword
(written June 2005)
In 2002...
Photography on the net was several things before it was about digital.
My first visit was in 1996, when I spent a lot of time on usenet and
various mailing lists. Everyone talked about equipment, about variants
of lenses and how to stop zoom creep with magic tape, and whether adding
an extra nicad to your F90 to make it focus faster would fry the circuits.
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Some dates:
1998 - Nikon
LS-2000 "is a big step forward in low-cost CCD scanners
[the first] which does not have fairly devastating problems."
2700dpi, almost $2000.
1999 - Nikon D1
digital SLR takes photojournalism digital. 2.7 Mp for just $5500.
2002 - Nikon
5000 digicam arrives: 28mm wide angle and 5 Mp for $1000. "Think
of it as 200 rolls of film with a free camera" says Bee.
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The next time I tuned in it was 2001, and the difference was astonishing:
people had scanners, so they could show and talk about pictures instead.
It was seeing too many nicely lit slides on photo.net that made me grow
tired of mine, I remember the revelation of coming across someone's Paris
street photos, alive with people. They were B&W and Leica of course,
next thing I was on the LUG and had dug out my grandfather's IIIc, and
so began this photo-a-week thing.
This film-dev-scan-and-show phase was meanwhile being overtaken by the
next, as prices of quality digital cameras dropped out of the stratosphere.
With this came a vast proliferation of sharing, the word photoblog appeared
and the effort bar dropped to zero.
Doing PAW
The photo-a-week list in 2002 seemed 'about right' in several ways. It
was big enough to keep going, but small enough to remember who'd done
what. It was not all beginners, nor all more serious artists, so while
there were developed styles and insightful comments, there were also enough
friendly slaps on the back to keep it unintimidating.
 I
learned a lot.
The regular practice and the impetus to shoot all sorts of things I'd
not shot before helped. Formulating comments on others' work helped at
least as much as reading theirs on mine. Having to choose just one as
the picture, and just one being enough, helped against my encyclopaedic
tendancies.
While I was certainly shooting better, seeing better, by the end of the
year, the biggest change was to my own expectations: I became less satisfied
with what I could do, and caught a glimpse of what I might be able to
do.
In 2005
I'm not quite sure where the photo-a-week list has gone to... the "paw"
list on topica now belongs to the Palestine Action Workshop, so I guess
it's moved. Some links point to www.micapeak.com
(in with a bunch of motorcycle lists) and some to www.fotoweek.com
(one of those pages that's 90% auto-generated statistics.)
The LUG has now moved to www.leica-users.org
but doesn't appear to have changed much, there are certain things you
can count on.
Kyle
Cassidy is still going strong. As are GDG,
SonC, and Brad
Daly.
And I'm busy struggling through my pictures from a 2004
project that could be titled "the year I bought a digicam."
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The
credit for inventing Photo-a-Week generally goes to Kyle
Cassidy, for announcing
that he intended to take one good picture every week, and challenging
everyone else to do the same:
That
was way back in 2000, and since then the idea has spread well beyond the
Leica Users Group. In 2002 it
got its very own email list (thanks to Jeffery
Smith) where all pretense at having to use Leicas was dropped. 