Before the summer of 2000, when the first solid digital cameras started to show up - the Nikon D1 launched in 1999 - all row2k photos were shot on a single film camera; specifically a Pentax K1000, which was considered the classic photography student camera, with a Pentax-A Zoom 1:4 70-210 lens.

This meant no chimping, no knowing if you got the photo, and no quick download from a memory card; in fact, shooting the photos was definitely the least time consuming part of the job, even for day-long regattas. Here is about how it went in those days:

• Shoot on film using one 100% manual camera (aperture, shutter speed, metering, zoom, focus, advancing film were all manual)
• This means changing film in the boat or on the dock, stuffing film canisters in pockets, and getting them all back safely
• Drive/take train/fly home from the regatta
• Drive 20 miles roundtrip to the local film developing place to be there at opening, drop off film
• Wait a few days for a call that the prints were ready
• Drive back to the local film developer, yap about whatever event it was
• Pick up and pay for a pile of yellow envelopes filled with 4x6 or 5x7 prints
• Drive home and fire up the lumbering desktop computer and, gulp, the scanner

That is when the true misery started.

row2k's 1990s Pentax K1000, still kicking

The scanner was a combo print/scan/fax machine, actually a decent version for 1999, but of course was truly, deeply awful to use (if you search on 'why printers still suck' you will see a long list of articles and posts dating back at least 10 years). Placing each photo in the upper left corner of the scanner and pressing "Scan" set off a series of steps that I can recall viscerally to this day.

The machine started to whirr, and the scanning bar crept excruciatingly slowly back and forth until done. Then the photo would appear on screen, bar by bar, and the cropping, saving, naming, making thumbs, building galleries, and uploading began.

The work was almost insanely plodding and tedious, but it is that slow, noisy crawl of the scanning bar that sticks with me to this day.

To get the 80 photos from the 1999 Henley online, I guessed that I worked almost two days non-stop until I could show them online, but since there were other things to do during that time, wasn't sure exactly how focused productive I had been. A couple months earlier, I had posted 74 photos of the EARC Sprints, the gallery for which it looks like was titled Monster EARC Sprints Gallery, indicative of the perceived effort and time required - but I wanted data.

As a test, a few weeks later when I did a gallery of the US team in training, before scanning I decided to pay attention to the amount of time it took to get each photo ready, on a per photo basis. I made sure not to do any other tasks when on the clock, and did a pretty solid test.

The verdict: each photo took about 11 minutes to do.

Thus, the 'Monster' EARC gallery of 74 photos took about 13.5 hours at the computer, the 1999 Henley gallery 0f 80 photos required over 14.5 hours, and the 113 photo US team gallery almost 21 hours.

Those numbers do not include actually shooting the photos, driving to and from the photo store, etc.

So it seems about right that the Monster 74-photo EARC gallery required about three days of labor - and that is after driving to Worcester and back and spending a full day at the event.

I would not deny that many of the resulting photos from the late 90s aren't great - the unorthodox cropping on the earliest photos is another story in itself - but given the combination of slow film, modest equipment, a short zoom, sometimes nutty conditions, substandard prints, hobbyist software (at best), and that gnarly scanner, at least they are sometimes good enough to show what happened on the day - a bit like the two photos shown at the top of the article.

K1000 viewfinder, which used a small stem that floated up and down to indicate overall exposure

The naming conventions I used at the time do make it easier to figure out who is who; I'll let readers poke around for some vintage looks to some of the best rowers in the late 90s, along with coaches, officials, rowing journalists and TV stars, presidents, a princess here and there, skit nights, and - well, go have a look if you can; here are links to the pre-digital galleries.

• 2000
• 1999
• 1998
• 1997