50ish chap.

My first camera was given to me by the old lady next door when I was about 5, it was a turn of the century plate camera, lots of wood and brass, but unusable as the plates would have been hugely expensive. My Dad was sensible enought to swap it with me for a Voigtlander Brilliant (saving the beautiful old camera in the process). The Voigtlander was a TLR shooting 120 film. The lens had no coatings on it and the scatter was terrible. It was probably about 40 years old at the time.

During the 80's a press photographer, Jon Bond (who now works for "The Sun") came to stay with us for a while. He encouraged me to buy an SLR and I managed to scrape together enought cash to buy a Practica Nova 1. I later sold this on to my big brother and bought a Canon AV-1 (TTL metering!) and then a Canon A-1 with a bit of help from my parents.

When I was 17 I got a Saturday job in a tool hire shop and bought myself a Rolleicord and then a Rolleiflex with my wages. I still have both these cameras.

Recently my wife was inspired to do some through the view finder (TTV) experiments and she has partlly inspired me to run a film through the Rolleiflex. So 35 years after my story started I have gone from using a 40 year old TLR to a 50 year old TLR!