D1scussion’s 10th anniversary!

Today exactly 10 years ago I founded D1scussion, a mailing list for photographers using Nikon Digital SLR Cameras.

10 years! Amazing! I remember it vividly, in 1999 I moved to Japan armed with a Nikon F5 and a F100 and a couple of lenses, than I saw the just released Nikon D1 in a shop for a whopping 700,000yen. While interested, I thought that I will never spend that much money on a camera alone. But after a couple more visits to the camera store, I just bit the bullet and bought one. Since I just sold one of my Internet projects, the money was not really the problem, but I realized fast that this new camera has quite a learning curve…it just didn’t behave at all as it should.

After some initial excitement, frustration set in and I looked for other people having experience with this camera. I joined several Nikon mailing lists, but whenever I mentioned that I owned a D1, people mocked me and rejected this camera more like an expensive toy. It became even more frustrating, so I took matters in my own hands and created a mailing list called D1scussion – a wordplay out of D1 and Discussion – dedicated to this new camera. After announcing it in several analog forums, the first members poured in. It was not my first mailing list, in fact back in 1996 I started a public mailing list service named KBX in Germany, which soon was used by more than 1/4 of all German Internet users.

D1scussion became an instant hit, in January 2000 already more than 200 photographers became members and even several Nikon employees joined. It became the de-facto support address for all digital pioneers and the discussions really helped everybody to get the most out of the camera. After a short while I learned that the part which frustrated me (mainly the totally unreliable flash behavior) was not my fault at all, but Nikon’s. D1scussion members came the the rescue and the group found a way to work around the problem. Nikon soon answered with a better flash, but it took a few more flash and camera generations to fix this problem completely. Another initial grief was the choice of the NTSC color space as the internal camera color space and back in 1999/2000 there was not much public knowledge of color management. The forum members were just amazing and even while practically all professional photographers were in some kind of competition with each other, everybody shared freely their knowledge, making us all better photographers.

Lots has happened in the last 10 years. D1scussion moved several times to new servers, cameras and software made an incredible jump forward in usability and quality and digital workflows are way better understood than back then, still there is demand for a knowledgeable group helping out when the need arises.

D1scussion now must be one of the best behaved Internet forums out there, I cannot remember when we had the last internal flame war or a troll annoying everybody, they simply don’t exist in this forum. Its also amazing how long people stay subscribed to D1scussion, in average longer than 5 years.

I must admit, having founded and maintained D1scussion for that long makes me a little proud. ;)

A photo of an analog photo shooting taken with my Nikon D1 10 years ago…