I purchased my first camera, a Canon T50 in 1984 with one of my first wage packets. To me it was the signal that I was a "Grown Up" - Owning my own camera, bought and paid for with my own money !

A couple of years later I upgraded to a T90, and dabbled a bit with developing my own prints, but this was just an occasional past-time, due to lack of space.

After a couple of years , my interest dwindled, and my cameras gatherd more dust than images :-(

When I bought my first digital camera, a Kodak DC210 ( with 1 megapixel 1152x864 resolution ), back in 1998 I think, I guess my interest was rekindled. Now I could see my pictures without having to take them to Boots and wait a couple of days or more. I took more pictures of my growing family, and it was great to be able to see the pictures daily as my screensaver!

I then progressed to a Canon G1, which I still have a great fondness for. I got an IBM 1GB MicroDrive to go with that, as I didn't want to run out of pictures too quickly. (Actually i ordered a 360MB drive, but Amazon sent me a 1GB. Sorry Amazon, I feel bad about that!)

After a while though, I found the G1 a bit big to fit in my pocket easily so rather rashly I bought a Casio Exilim EX-Z4 from Harrods of all places!. Small it was, but I was never really happy with the quality (but I wasn't trying to be the next David Bailey by any means).

Eventually, in 2007 I think, I upgraded to a Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ3 which I managed to get on offer somewhere so it seemed like a bargain, rather than an extravagance, and to have 10x optical zoom, well that was like having a "real" camera in my mind!

Marxh 2009 - I bought a Nikon D90 (March 2009), my first D-SLR. It was a big buy for me. What with the kit 18-105mm lens, a Tamron 70-300 zoom and a Lowepro backpack, it seemed like a big investment, so I'm trying to improve my results ( I have to justify the investment to my wife, the boss! )

October 2014 - Having worked for the same company for 30 years, I was given some Red Letter vouchers to spend, so after a bit of Umming and Ahhhhing, I've added a Nikon D7100 to my camera collection and also a Lowepro slingbag to (hopefully) make it a little easier to carry some gear while cycling as I've taken the easy way out and limited myself to my iPhone and a 2nd hand Panasonic TZ30 for the last year or so.

Hmm, that seems more a potted camera history rather than much about me, but maybe it'll help anyone who reads this to form some sort of picture of me. A picture of me? Well that brings us all the way back to photography, doesn't it? What a good place to stop rambling on!

Andrew