I upload photos taken with vintage digital cameras. I like the really early ones from the late 90s, early 2000 with low megapixel counts, grainy, noisy images and wonky colours often designed into funky shapes and styles before digital cameras all started to look the same and take perfect photos.&nb Read more...

I upload photos taken with vintage digital cameras. I like the really early ones from the late 90s, early 2000 with low megapixel counts, grainy, noisy images and wonky colours often designed into funky shapes and styles before digital cameras all started to look the same and take perfect photos.  


I started uploading to Blipfoto back in August 2009 and lasted 190 days without missing a day. I used a Ricoh GX100, a tiny Casio Exilim S3, a Nokia E71 phone and a professional Nikon D3 I used for work.
I became intermittent and less addicted during 2010. Using the app from a HTC phone made the process easier, but by July 2011 I had dried up.


4798 days later, on 5th September 2024 I logged back into my old account, to find all images still intact. 
after all the changes Blipfoto has been through. I’ve since managed a few non-stop runs, up to 186 days so my 2009 record still stands, so far… or maybe forever as I’m not so stressed if I miss a day or two.


My latest obsession since January 2025 is using vintage digital cameras. 


I’ve been using a 1.3 megapixel Olympus and a couple of early FujiFilms that all record to outdated SmartMedia cards. I bought another Casio Exilm from 2003, similar to the one I last used on Blipfoto in 2010.
I am also loving the old Sony Mavica cameras that record to a floppy disks. I have the FD71, less than 1 megapixel, and it’s a chunky big thing which clunks and whirrs when you take a picture but I like the extra challenge of using these early digital cameras. 
These old cameras are cheap to buy and rewarding to save from landfill, fix up and get working again after being outdated by a newer camera years ago.


I don’t mind the grainy, noisy images these old photos make. Sometimes they can recreate the look or photos we took in the late 1990’s and early 2000s. They add a charm of imperfection that has long been ironed out of modern cameras. Paintings have long been admired for misrepresenting reality with faults and flaws, but cameras are still chasing the flawless copy of reality.


So embrace the bad cameras. Look in your cupboards for long forgotten old cameras and bring them back to life. Turns out they can still make you smile.