I live in Oxfordshire, England, and work partly from home and partly in London. I've always enjoyed photography, starting when I was in my teens, although I've never considered myself a particularly skilled photographer.

As I guess many people did, I started taking more photographs when our children were young, and in those days I worked with a 35mm SLR - usually a Pentax. The arrival of our first grandchild in 2001 (a second came in 2003) made me realise I needed a more modern camera.

With some trepidation I converted to a Fuji digital zoom in 2002. Although the images were small by today's standards, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of photos produced. The Fuji had a 2MB capacity and I later upgraded to a 5MB Minolta zoom. However, I had not had this very long when it was destroyed in a flood in Summer 2007.

With the insurance money, and a bit more, I treated myself to a Nikon digital SLR, a D40X. I'm delighted with it, although I still don't use anything like the full range of functions it has. I've now abandoned the two kit lenses that came with it, and work with two Sigma lenses, a 10-20mm zoom and a 17-70mm macro zoom, and a Nikon 70-300mm VR zoom.

Having a proper d-SLR means I now have to remember how I took photos years ago. It is nice having much more control over what you do with the camera, but I have found it very difficult to get used to the amount of post-production image processing that is now possible. I'm gradually exploring the power of Paint Shop Pro and similar software, but still don't exploit it nearly as much as I could (or should)..

Apart from photographing grandchildren and dogs (of which, between us and our children, there are quite a few), my main interest is in landscape photography, mostly rural although sometimes urban. I have a particular fondness for the Isles of Mull and Iona in Scotland, which we have visited almost every year for over 30 years.

I consider my daughter, known on Flickr as Marlowpics, to be a far better photographer than I am. She has always been artistic, and has an excellent eye for composition. Quite often we will both be in the same place at the same time, which is why there is often a similarity between some of the postings on our photostreams.