So how did my love story with cameras start?
I mucked about with a bridge camera for a few years before a kind photographer took me to one side and carried out a simple demonstration.
"See, these two grains of rice..." he said, laying them side by side like grubs undergoing military training, "That's a bridge camera picture sensor. And take this large postage stamp.... " he placed this next to the military grubs.... "That's a DSLR camera sensor. Your dreams of getting an A2 sized poster print from the first one are somewhat dashed, no?"
He had a point. So after much geeky research, I bought my first DSLR - a Canon 70D (roughly equivalent to a Nikon D7100 - see how nice I am, I even translate into different languages...)
I think in the end I went for the camera with the most bells and whistles that I could afford, and an 18 - 55mm kit lens, a surprisingly capable lens, although in terms of build quality, it had a sort of crunchy crisp-packet quality zoom and was entirely plastic. I think it floated in the bath and if you had enough of them you could probably make a pretty decent feature necklace out of them.
This is from my first evening with the camera. It is almost the first photo I took - the actual first photo is of the manual, so nobody wants to see that...
This shows one of the more obscure advantages of having a flip-out viewing screen, you can photograph your dog without her realising you're doing it.
This picture was AutoSetting Everything, and I was hooked. No more bridge cameras for me.
However, as ripples radiate out across a pond from a falling pebble, so there have been repercussions as a result of moving to DSLRs: When I had a bridge camera, it seems I could travel around the world, I had something called money which assists this. So I have many photos of Singapore, New Zealand, Venice, Rome, Iceland, New York, Rarotonga.
Now I have a DSLR and the various bits of kit have the potential to be so wildly expensive, I no longer seem to have this money commodity and I find I can't afford to go anywhere.
I've got awfully good at photographing my home city of Leeds...