My first camera was a working toy camera the infamous Diana camera (although I seem to remember mine had Windsor on it) my father bought me. It took 120 film had a lens which turned about 40 degrees to focus from near to far, 3 aperture settings and fixed shutter speed. I guess the developing took care of the exposure to some degree.

The first camera I bought was my Minolta X-700 with a 50mm f1.7 lens and a Hanimex flash gun. I also bought the Hanimex 35ee Micro on the same day so I'd have something small to always carry with me. I know exactly when I did this as it was the day I cashed my first grant cheque, it was 1982 and I was just starting my Physics degree at UCL (Universtiy College London). I was lucky that back in those days we still got a (small) grant so I put it to good use. I still own the X-700 which gave me 25 years of great, reliable service. My little Hanimex also gave long and great service but has now retired into a foam padded small aluminium case, where it is very happy.

Many years later I supplemented the X-700 with a tiny Olympus mju-II and eventually got into digital photography with a Nikon Coolpix 3100.

But this wasn't the first time I had used a digital camera. This was a very rare and early Canon digital (still video camera) which EDS had bought for taking product shots way back around 1993. It stored the images on a small 2.5cm still video floppy disk and with a resolution below 1M pixels. It was one of the RC-2xx series, I think it was the RC-250 (Q-PIC) and I really enjoyed using it.

I still own all my cameras (I would never sell them) but rarely use film now, my little Canon IXUS-500 and the my wonderful Minolta 7D are used exclusively due to their quality and lets face it, cheapness to run. I have no film to buy and no developing to pay for, film has no chance with the masses.

Since 2004 I have stopped using any film but have added to my camera collection with ever bigger pixel count cameras, as you can see above.

Being a programmer I of course have written a utility to add IPTC tags to all my images. This works at a command line level which means I can basically do one, tens or hundreds of files in just one command. This was very useful when updating directories which had related content, but it also has add, update and replace modes to add extra information on each specific picture. For more see here.