fall inside a hole

My photography

I am far from a professional photographer, and only vaguely understand proper camera settings, but by being into old things and liking to have photographs of things I am interested in I have acquired a variety of cameras and equipment and photographs.

Other than documenting stuff for this website, which is primarily done in my own home using my cell phone camera, the main places I take significant numbers of photographs are FIRST Robotics competitions.

When I first started taking robotics photos as a freshmen in high school I only had access to old family digital cameras and the cameras built into my Nintendo 3DS. I did not really even think about taking photos of things during this time, and only have a few photos I took myself that year like 818's 2015 robot in its bag and a castle built out of field elements at the 2015 Center Line district competition.

When I got a cell phone later in high school I began to take a lot more photos. In the summer of 2016 I got an inexpensive Android smartphone with a camera that was still better than what I had ready access to previously but it was not until I began using a OnePlus 5 and later a OnePlus 7 Pro that my cell phone photos really became worth looking at. I also began to collect a lot of FRC-related photos in general, eventually leading to the creation of the FRC Archive.

I have taken photos using a variety of my older cameras including some Polaroid 600 type cameras, the Game Boy Camera, and various 35mm film cameras. I have never developed my own film, although I would like to get into it at some point.

Two of the cameras I take out the most with me now are my two Sony Mavica floppy disk-based cameras, which I have taken out to robotics events since 2022. I still find that the 3.5" floppy is an easy method for getting photos onto my computer(s) and I have had no complaints with the Mavica's interface or features, particularly the MVC-FD97 with its 10x optical zoom.

After shooting a stack of disks, I copy the image files off the disks, put them in a folder, and get ready to import them into the archive. In addition to the images, Mavicas also save .411 thumbnail files for use in the camera's own menus and an HTML file that allows you to browse the camera's images on a computer using a web browser instead of a file browser, if that is something you particularly want to do. A MAVICA.HTM and the accompanying photos taken at the 2024 FIRST in Michigan District Championship can be viewed here, if you would like to see what one of these files looks like.

When I have a folder of images to go through and tag for the FRC Archive, I open an Excel sheet on one side of my monitor and the first image in the folder open in a photo viewer on the other half. The file paths are then pasted in as well as the source of the images. If I know ahead of time that every (or most) image in a folder is from a specific year and/or event or team I will add the appropriate tag into the right column and then go image by image and add any appropriate tags and remove images that are irrelevant or unviewable. Then I find and replace the file paths in the Excel sheet to be what they will be when the files are on the server and copy them over to the right folder for the site to import the photos based on the data in the CSV files from Excel.

Searching for the URL of this page in the FRC Archive will return the photographs in the archive taken by myself. If you have come here by clicking the source link on any of my photographs in the archive, hello! This page does not serve as the original source of the photographs (I simply upload my photographs directly into the archive), but it does contain some information you may find interesting.