Covid Clean-Up - Digging Into the Photo Archives 17

With the current race season on hold, and not a whole lot going on around the moto world, I finally did it...I started a major clean-up project with my old archived photos.

A lot of stuff my early stuff got archived to CDs or DVDs. The more recent Macbook Pros aren't even equipped with a CD/DVD drive, so I recently picked up an external so I could access them. Surprise! The most recent Catalina OS doesn't allow you to access files in one of the older formats (if I remember correctly, it's HFS, while it will read disks burnt in HFS+ format). That meant for quite a pile of discs, I had to use my girlfriend's Mac (which hasn't been updated to the most recent OS) to copy them to her hard drive, and then transfer them to my laptop. What a time-consuming hassle! But enough of the technical talk...let's get down to photo business.

When I shot the photos below at the 2000 X Games in San Francisco, I was right on the verge of switching from film to digital. These were shot with a Nikon Coolpix, which had a weird swivel in the middle of the body. At that point, I'd picked up a 256 megabyte memory card, and thought that would be plenty of storage. Surprise! It didn't take long for it to fill up, but it made up for it by being hideously expensive. Oddly enough, I still have both the camera and the card.

I was shooting for Specialized Bicycles at this event, but couldn't resist shooting the moto events, too. I think this was the one where Brian Deegan rolled out with the spiked shoulder pads...but all those shots are on slides, and still well-buried.

With these photos, the more I dig, the more I find. Here are some from CMC action back in '01.

Okay, that's it for this one. There are a ton more events to revisit, and a whole bunch more photos to wade through. I've been surprised at some of the stuff I've found, and I hope you guys enjoy them. Looking back at the past has been really fun, and it also makes me appreciate where we're at now. Look for 1-2 of these a week for a while while we're in lockdown.