I've been interested in computers since the early 80's and in video for about the same time. Editing any footage was always a pain forwarding, rewinding, pausing and dubbing. When I first got a video capture system it was for an old 8 bit computer. You really had to know what you were looking at to make anything of any of the pictures, not ideal for editing.

By the time I had my own house in 1997 I had a capture card for my PC. Unlike the original capure system this time we had full colour, TV quality images, but they were still, still. Each image would take twenty to thirty seconds to create, any movement during that time would create a funky colour split effect. There was also no way to time delay regular pictures for something like I have today.

In 1998, once I had a real web cam I set it up on the top of the monitor and everywhere the computer went so did the web cam. While decorating my house the computer went from the back bedroom to the front room, back up to the back bedroom and finally to it's resting place in my bedroom.

I used the web cam with Microsoft Netmeeting so that Barbara could see me when we were talking. I didn't have a regular web cam picture on my home page as the software at the time was not reliable and caused the machine to crash too often.

In November of 1998 I sat the web cam by the side of my bed, left the light on and went to sleep. The camera took a picture every two minutes all night. Watching the pictures the next day was hilarious. At some points I was smiling, at other times I was licking the pillow, some times the light must have been annoying me since I just hid under the covers.

This year I have bought a digital handy cam and found that the web cam software recognises the camera. The latest pictures are now much higher quality. The digital handy cam works better in low light (even no light) as well as giving sharper colours and pictures.

I'm using Webcam32 software from www.surveyor.com.

The images down the left of this page are mixtures of pictures from the old web cam and the latest pictures taken by the current system.

The following are some links to other web cam sites around the world: