A long, long time ago, when most of today's spotters weren't even born yet, there were a handful of carspotters. It might be fun to hear a veteran tell how different things were back in those days. Think about the technical possibilites, the spotters 20 years ago could only dream about such things!
Take the cameras, for instance. Of course none of them were digital, so for taking pictures, you had to buy films first. These were available in sizes of 12, 24 or 36 photos, so with a film of 36 you had to change them less often. For a spotter this might be important, you could save some valuable time. The film with the negatives had to be rewinding. When we flash back even further in time this had to be done by hand, happely technology evolved also at that point so it was done automatically. As a spotter, you'd be seriously afraid of missing a spot. After the rewinding of the film, you had to change the film, wind it to the first photo and you were ready for action again..up to 36 photos long!
Making a 20 pictures photo series of an exotic wasn't the way things went, your films would be full in a meantime. This would also cost you a lot of money, not only the films weren't free, the developing wasn't either. Looking on your display if your photos are okay wasn't possible either. You would know after some days, after they had been printed. Each photo costed money, and coming home with 500 photos was very expensive!
Also the exotic cars were more exotic than they are now. To see one, you had to wait much longer than you have to do now. You'd also have to do this alone, because carspotting was an completely unknown phenomenon. Only when the websites like Autogespot were established, carspotting became a real hobby. Now you can see the best locations, whole groups of spotters, who also keep each other up to date with their smartphones, to tell what they can spot on certain locations. Just moments after that, you can see the pictures appear on the internet.
To show and see each others photos, you visited the handful of spotters at home. Looking through photo albums was the only way to see the cars others had captured. This was a lot of dragging, two overnight bags full of photo albums weren't that light!
We can conclude that the hobby carspotting has become a lot easier, cheaper and nicer over the years. You see, not everything was better back in the old days! The pictures of this column are taken in the period 1990-2001.
Lars
