I am going back through some of the photos I took while in Japan back in 2007. My wife gave me my Christmas present early that year – a Nikon D40 – and I couldn’t put it down.
It is fun to see how far I have come in terms of my knowledge of overall photographic principles, aperture, shutter speed, ISO etc, composition etc.
Nice, I did something similar the other day, dug up the first digital SLR pics I ever took (it was pretty silly… I’d had one semester of photo 101 learning photography and bought a Canon 5D to take with me on a trip… and then didn’t pick it back up after the trip, sold it a few months later. Glad I finally got back into it.)
I’m a little jealous that you got to roam around SLR in hand in Japan. I served a mission in Korea right before digital cameras started to be available to the mainstream (98-2000) and I would have *loved* one then. Haven’t been back since…