I’ve been an ‘on and off again‘ member of CAPIC (Canadian Association of Professional Image Creators). The head office is located in Toronto, Ontario – with several chapters scattered across Canada.
Their mission is somewhat similar to the group in the USA called ASMP (American Society of Media Photographers). I had joined ASMP back in the early 1980′s – being sponsored by photographers: Robin Perry in Connecticut and Bill Staley from North Vancouver BC.
In the early 1990′s, I volunteered to be the Treasurer of the Vancouver Chapter – and somehow ended up doing this task – for 5 years. No one wanted to rise their hand – each time the AGM rolled around…
Both memberships were put on hold – back in 1996. This was an attempt to cut overhead, while I tried to write in Java based software program about Resolution.
Moved back to Calgary to stay with family and after 6~ years and thousands of hours of coding, I couldn’t find the energy to work on the 5th rewrite.
The 4th version only took a year to write.
Had sold a lot of photo equipment earlier, to have extra funds to live on. The hope was that the gear would all be replaced – when my software would start selling.
But I got finally tired of being broke all the time and my stock picture sales eventually reached zero, so I started doing handyman projects – to survive.
Maybe one day, I’ll create a short video – of how my program worked…
All the Canadian chapters try to publish some sort of monthly newsletter for the local members. This particular issue had a small write-up about me.
Back in 1988, I had a studio space on Homer Street, near Helmcken (in the trendy area of Yaletown – Vancouver BC).
First Image Group was a small company run by Mike Peredo and Ross Cameron. They supplied graphic solutions and were a few blocks away.
Ended up purchasing from them, a high-end graphics video card from AT&T called Truevision AT-Vista. Think I paid about $10,000 for this card. I still have it sitting in storage. An expensive memento from the early days…
There was one for sale at eBay, for around $55.
Back then, most people would try to get the Targa video card – which was much cheaper, than the ATVista model.
Images were edited with software from Truevision called Vista Tips ($3,500). Another powerful editing program – was written by Ron Scott (Texas USA) and was called HiRes QFX ($3,500).
Ron also had another software program called QPR (Quick Picture Recorder) – which controlled the Matrix QCR-Z 4k film recorder ($5,000 at auction). Saw a recorder on eBay recently, for $149.95.
I still have mine – sitting in storage…
Both the scanner and recorder – ran off a GPIB (General Purpose Interface Bus) card, and was purchased from National Instruments – located in Texas USA.
Truevision also made Vista RIO ($3,700), which was used to run the Howtek 35mm film scanner ($10,000).
A few times a year, I would drive down to Seattle – to attend a local ASMP meeting.
During one of these visits – they happened to have a raffle that night and I ended up winning a new paint program – made by Aldus called PhotoStyler.
Eventually Adobe purchased Aldus in 1994 and I could only assume – that parts of the program’s code, got amalgamated into the new Photoshop.
First Image would occasionally send out newsletters and in this one – they included a small write-up, about what I was doing…
I invested a lot money on tools back then. Guess it never ends… 🙂