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Thrifty Thursday: Memories of Digital Memory

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American



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Thrifty Thursdays feature photographs taken with equipment costing less than $500.

[HP deskjet F4280 printer/scanner - $99]

This scan tracks the progression of my digital photography career from my hobby days with a 3 megapixel point-and-shoot camera through a series of higher resolution cameras requiring ever more space and write speed. These aren't all my memory cards. Piles of them are lost, or sold at garage sales, but I found enough to lay out on a desktop scanner and tell the basic story. Take a look, for example, at the 3rd card in the 2nd row. It's marked with an "X"- a message to myself that the card had failed and should be discarded.

Alex Wild is Curator of Entomology at the University of Texas at Austin, where he studies the evolutionary history of ants. In 2003 he founded a photography business as an aesthetic complement to his scientific work, and his natural history photographs appear in numerous museums, books and media outlets.

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