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.
The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
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. Follow Alex Wild on Twitter
