When I was 16, my father gave me a used Canon SLR camera for my birthday. He got it from someone who worked with him in his local Brooklyn copy and supplies store. Incidentally, Mike, who sold my father the camera, also gave me a pair of real (most made now are of aluminum) brass knuckles. This was around ’95. Since my father both sold and developed film, all I had to do was take pictures and then give the roll to him. I took all black and whites. My father died a couple of years later. I went off to college. I spent a couple of years in India (a photographer's paradise) where the Canon saw its demise: while sleeping on an overnight train ride going from Varanasi to Calcutta and through Bihar (a bandit state), my bags were cut into and robbed. I lost my camera and a chess set. Didn’t have much else other than backpackers filth, and any money I had was somehow wrapped around my body. I didn’t get another camera, strangely, for almost ten years (!). Last summer (2009) I won 1500 dollars in the World Open chess tournament in Philadelphia. I was looking through old pictures and suddenly remembered how much I used to love taking photos. So, I bought a Canon DSLR EOS 500d Rebel T1i with an 18-55 mm lens with the money I had won. Since then: all forward, all significant.

"... one day indistinguishable from the next, a long continuous chain, then suddenly - there is a change."

(Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver)