This image of Céline and Jörg is the first digital photograph taken by a photographer (me) outside of the engineer’s laboratory.
Jörg and Céline - The First Digital Photograph
Caveat - While the engineers at Eastman Kodak were designing and building the first working prototypes (I believe there were three), they absolutely took innumerable photographs with these early units. Several years ago, on September 6, 2014, when I decided to bring the story of digital photography to light, I contacted Jim McGarvey, the lead engineer of the project to discuss with him my claim of being the first photographer to take a digital photograph. He confirmed that most of the photographs they had taken were of charts on the wall for testing. It is highly unlikely that any of these would exist today.
I do not recall if it was Jim himself or someone else who initially contacted me first back in 1990, but I was sitting in my cubicle at Kodak’s Marketing Education Center in Henrietta, NY, when I received that fateful phone call. I had just graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology with a full scholarship from Kodak, the first ever given to a photography student, and was working for the Professional Photography Division, not as a photographer, but rather as a Marketing Education Coordinator.
The man on the line said that he was told that I was a photographer and asked me if I would be willing to help them test a new “secret” product that they are considering to bring to market. I agreed, and took leave from my manager to drive to Elmwood, Kodak’s gigantic Research and Development, and also manufacturing plant to pick up the rather heavy case that included a Nikon F3 camera retrofitted with Kodak’s proprietary digital back, and the Digital Storage Unit (DSU) that had to be tethered to the camera via a long cable in order for the system to work.
I had invited my friends Jörg and Céline over for dinner that evening and they arrived shortly after I got home. Jörg was also a photographer and I was eager to show him the new camera which I had learned to use just a few hours before from the engineer himself. The previous year I had already taken a course of digital imaging at RIT, although it was based exclusively on images captured with Still Video cameras, since at that time there were not yet any digital capture cameras. So it was pretty easy for me to operate the new camera.
Serendipity
That day I could have easily stopped at a gas station to fill the tank of my Mitsubishi Montero, taken the camera out of its case and photographed whatever mundane subjects were within my sight. It had always been my practice to photograph regularly anything and everything in my surroundings. But fortunately that fateful day, I waited until I got home and without having planned it, took the camera out at the moment when this young couple were available to be the first humans to be captured digitally. Not as a regular portrait of them looking at the lens and smiling, but rather looking at themselves in the monitor of the DSU.