I've always been interested in photography since my gran gave me a kodak box camera when I was young. Not sure what age.. maybe 6 years old?

In the 1970's, when I started earning money I bought a pentax mx. They were new out.. A lovely camera, very small for an SLR, just drop it into my pocket!..

After that, lots of black and white, transparencies and an expensive sojourn with cibachrome.. That stuff was not cheap to print on, although colour rendition was good.

Time passes, and here we are with digital cameras with a decent resolution. I have still yet to find a good printer at a reasonable price though.. my first digi camera was a VGA resolution thing.. used it a couple of times, so disapointing!.. Now have a Pentax digi SLR and a little pocket Pentax Optio.

Wanted to go see some of Africa and desperately did not want to do a package tour thing, paying your money and turning up is not for me!

Have done a few road trips in the last few years, europe, Morocco and Algeria.

Algeria was nice..get down south and the people are great, the scenery stunning. I so so want to go again.. soon!

We drove from the UK, to Marseilles then caught ferry over to Tunisia. Thru Tunisia into Algeria, we drove to the geographical centre of the Sahara, Tamanrasset. Exploring the Hoggar to within 20k of the Niger border, recorded loads of prehistoric art, either paintings or engravings, some look like they were painted recently, but you know it was done 1000's of years ago when the sahara was wet and animals roamed in grass.

After the softness of the Hoggar, we moved onto the Tefedest, a harsh ancient volcanic mountainous area, both are very surreal.

We wanted to go over to Djanet, but the authorities would not let us.. never told us why, just said no!.. I resented that as we so wanted to see the paintings there too..

We never got there because of this.

drove back too.. 2500 miles from Devon to Tamanrasset, and 1500 miles in the desert when we were down there. Its good, if you can stand the hassle of being stopped by police and army often, just to fill in a little 'fiche'..

No point, but they do it anyway.

I now run a company installing Renewable Energy systems, mainly Solar Electricity and Wind generation.

Website: www.chrisrudge.co.uk

Blog: www.deepgreen.org.uk