In the beginning...

I've always been a keen photographer, I guess it's something I inherrited from my Dad who has always owned multiple cameras and has a collosal amount of pictures and slides, projector equipment etc. and took the step into DSLR's some time ago. Also my Grandad was always a very keen photographer and his slide shows became legendary - often being asked to put on special slide shows and talks particularly on local history and the local areas.


As a young boy I took great delight in using my Dad's cine camera though back in those days the cost of film was not cheap so it was something I never repeated unfortunately (thought: I must investigate whether my Dad still has his camera and all the other equipment). When video cameras came along and I managed to borrow one for a while I took great delight in putting together a short film with my brother and cousin - "Ninja Warrior" I believe was the title... :)


As far back as I remember I always owned a compact camera - again the cost of film & development meant that I couldn't just snap away all of the time but whenever we went away on holidays I usually had a new film in the camera and took holiday snaps.


As a teenager I lost interest (as teenagers do) and have a period of several years of my life where I have no pictures to look back at, then came the first of the digital cameras and life changed forever!


They obviously weren't cheap, and the photo's they produced weren't the best quality, and it wasn't easy at first to get pictures produced from the digital images, but here was something that you could just use over and over without having to pay for film and get it developed. I think my first usage of digital cameras in anger was when I started getting into modified cars and I would take pictures of my handywork and eventually started creating websites with these pictures. I wrote how-to guides on the things I did and edited the pictures to include crude arrows etc.


At this stage, I was still using the pictures as functional things, if you wanted to take a picture just to look at the outstanding beauty of something or intrigue and marvel over the way something looks you still needed to remortgage your house to be able to afford the necessary equipment.


However, as I upgraded my cameras, the quality started to improve, and finally I started looking at the art side of photography rather than the functional side and that's when you really start to push your camera and start trying to understand how things work and what makes a better picture.


Here are a small selection I took using my Hitachi HDC-751E:

The lights of NYC

Sunset in the Maldives

Deckchairs

Approach to Venice

Catching the sun in Koh Larn, Thailand

A quiet Venetian street

Then along came DSLR's, the next step, and the difference in quality of the pictures was obvious to me. My Dad invested and the pictures he was producing were far and away better than anything I could hope for with a compact. But the price tag was still a little high for me so I held off, sticking with my compact cameras.


Eventually, after some of my friends invested in DSLR's and I saw the pictures they were taking, I started to realise this was something I really had to invest in. Pictures of a holiday destination that both me and a friend had visited were so different in quality and really my pictures failed to capture the essence of the place as well as his did.


On top of that my friends attended a photography course which taught them a lot about equipment, settings and different approaches to photography (I guess my years of taking photo's helped my eye for composure because when they explained the rule of thirds to me we realised a lot of my pictures already stuck to this rule despite having never heard of it)