This is the first sheet of the first photo log I created. It documents the exposures on the first roll of 35mm slides I shot after buying my first camera, a Honeywell Pentax H1a. Before that I had used the family camera, which I think was some Kodak Brownie model.

This type of written log endured through August 1970; by that time it was 99 sheets, one sheet for each roll of film (slides or black-and-white negatives). Then I stopped maintaining a photo log, perhaps due to apathy. But when I began shooting digital images in 2003 I realized I wanted to catch up with my history of photography, so I transcribed all this handwritten information into an Excel spreadsheet. That was tons of work.

I soon realized that I was creating digital images much faster than I could document them individually, which caused me to switch to a system of briefly listing the subjects of each day’s shooting. This worked better in a Word file, so I transferred all the Excel data to a Word file and carried on from there. That file got huge---about 400 pages, much too large to print.

When I got Lightroom for managing my images, I stopped adding data to the Word file. I still use that file to find film images of subject x or date Y, but that’s all.