User:Fir0002/1yr on Wiki

Intro
It has now been 1 year since I started uploading to Wikipedia! I think during that time I’ve achieved a name for myself as a photographer, as I’ve uploaded around 800 photos or 400mb of files. I’m a GFDL uploader and I think that the concept of Wikipedia – free knowledge – is awesome to say the least. My very first photo was one of a dandelion. This was also the first photo I put onto the Featured Picture Candidates page. It was strongly rejected, and quite rightly so. Messy, and full of suffering chromatic aberration, it was the best photo in the world to me at the time. Fortunately I didn’t take the rejection to heart, but rather took it as a challenge, and soon after got my first Featured Picture.

Key Dates

 * First Picture: dandelion, 09:59, August 31, 2004
 * First Featured Picture Candidate: dandelion
 * First Featured Picture: Image:Emperor Gum Moth.jpg – at the time I featured this picture, I had it misnamed as a “polyphemus moth”. It was later correctly identified and reuploaded. Nominated at 09:22, 4 Sep 2004, promoted at 09:54, 18 Sep 2004
 * First Picture of the Day: Image:Emperor Gum Moth.jpg, Saturday 18 September, 2004
 * First pictures in the quartro: Image:Emperor Gum Moth.jpg, and Image:Red sunset02.jpg both appeared in the inaugural edition.
 * First article: Pasture Day Moth, created at 10:44, September 4, 2004
 * First Argument: Template:Support and Template:Object and Template:Oppose, started at 21:47, 20 Jun 2005, sort of finished at 08:35, 26 Jun 2005.

Equipment
Originally most of my photos were taken with my little Kodak Easyshare LS633, but now I’m using a much more professional camera, the Canon 20D. The Kodak served me well over the years, and some of the photo’s I took with it I still consider to be among the best I have taken. It had no manual focus, fumbling macro auto focus, poor handling of noise, three optical zoom and three megapixels. Nevertheless it was definitely a usable tool. However, after I took it up to the snow and it got a bit wet (I think this was the reason) the camera developed some pretty bad idiosyncrasies. For instance, taking a photo in daylight conditions using any zoom would result in a horribly blue tinged photo. Take the same photo at night using a fill flash and it would work fine. Clearly it was time for a change, and that change came in the form of the 20D. This of course enhanced the quality of my photos IMO, but also created a little problem for me, as I wanted to make money out of my photos but I still wanted to give my photos free to wiki. I figured that I could safely upload them for a while yet, as I haven’t told many people in my area about Wikipedia (sorry for not spreading the word!)

Over the year I have obviously gained quite a bit of wiki knowledge, but I still consider myself somewhat a new comer, as I’m not too familiar with a lot of aspects of Wikipedia not directly involved with uploading a photo and putting it in an article and am still caught out because of this. One of the best things I’ve learnt is the existence of the Reference desk, as prior to that, I just didn’t bother uploading some photos as I couldn’t identify them.

Anyway it’s been a great year, and I look forward to a new year, with more Featured Pictures – my constant motivation!