I would describe myself as a keen amateur photographer of mature years. My late father once told me that I had my first camera when I was four, but the first I can actually remember was when I was seven and that was a Brownie 127. I was then given an Agfa Sollinette. At the time, on a school holiday in St. Mary’s bay in Kent, I dreamt of one day having a camera that could ‘zoom’ from very wide to telephoto without having to change lenses, and could take thousands of photos without having to change film. I was eleven - little did I know that 45 years or so later, we could all have such a camera, and many photographers, of course, do.

I bought a black Leica II with an f/3.5 Elmar for £20 when I was twelve. A few months afterwards, I part exchanged the Elmar for an f/2.0 Summar. That was my first real photographic mistake. The Summar is a really soft lens. I part exchanged the Leica for my first SLR, a Practica FX2, and I saw this as an real advance in technology. A few year later, my father gave me his Pentax S2.

At university, photography took a back seat, although in my final year I left some negatives in the darkroom and passed the word around to my fellow students that if they wanted prints they could print them themselves. They did, and to my pleasant surprise the next day the room was full of 10 x 8s hanging up to dry.

I took up photography enthusiastically again in 1981,with the purchase of a brand new Canon A1 with an f/1.4 50mm lens and a couple of third party zooms . The A1 served me well for many years, until I bought a second hand Canon T90 in 1994. I fell in love with the T90 and subsequently amassed a wide collection of FD optics, including the 14mm, 20-35mm and 50mm & 85mm f/1.2 lenses, two extra bodies and various accessories.