My love for photography started at about 9 or 10 years old when I was given an old Kodak Box Brownie camera to try. I remember, not much older than that, wandering around Croydon with that camera while on a trip to see my grandmother. Sadly I no longer have the photos (or my grandmother), but still remember the excitement when I got to see the rather fuzzy black and white photos that came back from Boots.
By the time I was 13 I got my first 'proper' camera - a Petri 7S rangefinder, and a few years later a Pentax S1a SLR. Within a couple of years I was developing and printing my own photos, and only gave up the darkroom (aka bathroom!) after getting married and kids came along. Although D&P at home is having somewhat of a revival just now, I don't relish going back to the smelly chemicals, and the repeated failure to get a decent print - digital is just fine for me!
Landscape has always been a passion but I've dabbled in most other styles of photography, and I've lost count of the different cameras I've bought and sold over the years - some of those cameras would have been collectors items now, and worth a fortune! A dodgy back and some arthritis means I can no longer tote a heavy backpack up and down hills, so I've recently finally accepted that something more portable is the only way forward, and sold those big and heavy zoom lenses etc in favour of a single camera body and a couple of small prime lenses. Hopefully this will allow me to carry on making images right through my 70s!
Oddly, in all those years, I've never developed a 'style' of my own, preferring to make photos pretty much as they presented themselves to me - maybe something more creative is still lurking there...
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