Almost into another decade

Image : Shop Door in Mumbles on a Christmas Day 2008 Walk (c) Rhys Jones

It seems just yesterday that we were in 1999 and on the threshold of a new millennium and now already a decade has passed. Just thinking back to that period, the internet was quite new to most people and operated over a 56Kb dial up phone line and was very slow. Images and sound files took an eternity to transmit. Email was the 'new' way to communicate then. Now we have all the technology we need to set up a recording studio in our front room and take photographs, put them into an on-line album and send that album half way round the world.

The great American landscape photographer Ansel Adams was also an enthusiastic mailer - of the traditional kind - using the US Postal Service. He wrote letters to photographers, his parents, politicians, writers, artists,kids throughout the whole of his life. I wonder what he would have made of blogging -I think he probably would have been very enthusiastic about having a platform for his work and his views -although I believe his work would have spoken for him had he not chosen to engage in this medium.

I must say that I've met some very interesting people since 1999 when I first took to thecyberspace highway and I doubt if I would have encountered them otherwise. It is interesting that phones with video cameras embedded in them have not taken off as predicted in 1999 - the idea of being able to see someone at the other end of a phone does not seem to have had the same appeal - possibly because of the cost involved.