Wow!  I can't believe we have already reached 20,000 images in our gallery.  The vast majority of these have been taken since Drew's birth which makes this even more astounding.  We've gotten here through a combination of equipment.

The stone age (film)

Caryn and I have always been avid picture takers.  Early on, we had a Canon point and shoot 35mm.  It was OK while it lasted.  We got a few years out of it, but it met it's match on a rainy camping trip to West Virginia where some citronella wax got spilled onto it.  Later that year, I bought a Canon Elph for Caryn for Christmas.  This brought a new level of ease and convenience to our picture taking experience.  Not only was this camera absolutely tiny, but the optics were great and the pictures show it.  In addition to the camera improvements, this camera also used the Advantix cartridge system for the film.  This really idiot proofed the experience for us.  We got a number of years out of this camera and it was used side by side with our first couple of digital cameras due to the nice quality of the pictures.  It met it's demise a few years ago after it's second trip to Canon to repair some operational issues.

The  early years (early digital)

Our first experience with a digital camera was through work where they had a 640x480 Sony diskette camera.  This camera saved the images to a 3.5 diskette at 640x480 resolution - 0.6 mega pixels.  This is email resolution these days.  Our first digital camera was a similar Sony that saved images to a 3.5" floppy diskette but had a max resolution of 1024x768 (1 mega pixel - also know as 1mp).  I think we were getting about 12-14 images per diskette.  Well, eventually, the diskette drive quit on that model.  We knew this was the future of photography for us.  Even though we still used the Canon Elph side by side with this camera, we knew that we would not buy another film camera.

After the death of the Sony disk camera, I got a Sony 3.2mp camera for my birthday.  I still have this camera now and use it extensively for photographing job sites, work I'm doing on the house and cars, and even filling in when I can't put my hands on Caryn's digital for family shots.  It takes nice pictures and even mini movies.  Unfortunately, I fear it may be on it's way out since I get some flaky performance from it.  Considering how well it has served me and that 3.2mp is plenty for my purposes, replacing it inexpensively should be rather easy.  I'll cross that bridge when I come to it though.

Speaking of Caryn's camera, a few years ago, Caryn got a Canon digital Elph for Christmas.   This camera is as small, if not smaller than it's film counterpart.  It's a 4mp device and takes great pictures and mini movies.  It came with a 16mb SD memory card which is pretty useless.  We promptly got a 1gb SD memory card - we've only ran out out of room on this card twice, so it has been good.  They have now come out with 2gb SD memory cards, but that is overkill for a 4mp camera in my opinion.  We are religious about emptying the cards every day or two, so that helps.  If the next camera is a 7mp or so (which I anticipate), then a 2gb memory card might make sense.  They are dirt cheap now, so no big shake anyway (Seen them for $10).

Converting the film (film scanning and watching paint dry)

Ugh, the monotany - but it's a necesary evil if I wanted to convert our film to digital.  I could have paid a service to do it, but that was much more expensive than buying a scanner and doing it myself.  The toughest part turned out to be finding a reasonably priced film scanner that would handle both film negative strips and the Advantix cartridges.  While I loved the convenience to the Advantix system, it turns out that the rest of the world never warmed up to it since it coincided a bit too closely with the advent of the digital camera. 

The scanning device I found was under $200 by Konica/Minolta (Dimage Dual Scan IV) - this had to be supplemented with the Advantix adapter for another $90 or so.  It took about 3 weeks to come up with both parts.  It took roughly 2-3 weeks of scanning off and on between projects to get all of our film converted.  I still believe we have quite a few cartridges and negatives that we haven't located yet within our house - at least I think so.   Seems there are too many large gaps in our picture taking chronology from our "film" years.

About our online gallery

Our online gallery was one of the first online things of substance that I tackled - I even had to have someone set up my initial gallery since I knew nothing of web programming, php, ftp, or anything web related.  I started out by getting a hosting package that I could live with from a cost standpoint.  Since I pay quarterly, it is roughly $20 per month.  The nice thing about it is that if I outgrow it, a lot of things have gone right for some of my sites and migrating to a dedicated server will actually be warranted.  No hosting service is perfect, but mine has been pretty good and more importantly, they are reachable 24/7 via live chat to solve any issues.

The reason I opted to host my own picture gallery is mainly two-fold.  First, I wanted control over the interface - this meant no pop up ads like Yahoo's gallery, or the other web galleries out there.  Plus I had been using my free hosting that was part of my Internet Service Provider and they had lost all my information - since I wasn't a business customer, they basically said tough luck.  Never again.  Well, our initial Cebulak gallery was the Menalto Gallery version 1.4.  This is a free gallery and is quite robust in it's features.  I had also looked at Coppermine which is similar, but felt the support for the Menalto Gallery was better.  Our initial version was a non-database driven gallery and had limits on how many images it can manage.  I started running into some capacity problems during this past summer.  Fortunately, the solution was an upgraded version of Gallery (2.1).  I was able to migrate our gallery without a problem to the new version a few months ago.  Since this version is driven by a MySQL database, there is really no limit on how many images I can add.

I have since set up galleries for Caryn's family and my family since I have excess capacity on my hosting plan.  Links can be found to these other galleries under our "Links" page here.