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That's a question that leads off onto a number of roads; are we talking about what social imperative drove you? Or what muse inspired you? Or what fee was offered to you? Or are we asking for more pedestrian info: what camera did you use?
A lot of artists in other disciplines would deal with the first three questions and find the fourth one puzzling or irrelevant. A successful writer might not know the name of the typewriter or word processor that they used to bang out their Pulitzer winner. A novelist might not know whether they wrote with a ball-point or fountain pen. They'd have remembered a Texta on the back of a chip packet, but...
As photographers we are different - I'll bet every person who has garnered some form of recognition or reward can remember the camera, lens, film, light, and sensor settings for their prize-winner. If they can't recall it instantly, they can go back at multiple stages of the process and see what the camera recorded onto the memory chip. The Photoshoppers can frequently see every adjustment they made preserved in a history. If they are bad at it, so can everyone else...
Do we use this remarkable electronic memory for any good purpose?
Well, if you are a traveller it can recall the place and time you took a picture - long after the trip has blurred into a pudding of airports and temples. Heaven forbid that it should form forensic or legal evidence...but it can. It can help identify people that you cannot recall and vice versa.
It can supply scientific fact to others - even if you are the least scientific creature on the planet.
And the glorious thing is that it has far outdistanced the crude film-strip recording methods of the 50's - and the annoying little time and date marks that we burned into our colour transparencies in the 1980's - often to the detriment of the only really good shot on a roll. I'm grateful that I can remember August '83 but if I had been shooting a wedding that day and forgot to turn the imprinting lights off on the Pentax LX the bride would have murdered me. Those date and time backs were a bomb waiting to explode.
Modern day data tags along behind the ship but in a different dinghy. And you can cast it adrift before you send the ship to someone else.
One final note. For all the photographers who grow sad when they see a successful picture from their past...but think to themselves " I'll never be able to do that again. "...they should take heart. Doing that made you what you are right now and the way forward is clear to do something even better. Just get out there and snap away.
