So how did you get started photography?

[vk2gwk]

Sorry to disappoint you, Rick, but I also started with the Box Brownie... First time I can remember was when I was ten on a school excursion to Amsterdam Airport. Apart from some planes on the apron I had lots of shots of planes in the air: little black speck against an overexposed background. After developing and printing at the local chemist I proudly pointed them out to my Mum: "see, that is a DC8 and that a Lockheed..."
My amateur radio hobby - needing some fairly expensive gear to work with - has always interfered, but in the sixties I got my first SLR, an East German made Practika with a 50mm F/2.8 prime. That lasted about ten years until the shutter failed..... But in the meantime I took a lot of photos, developed my own films, printed and enlarged in my own darkroom. Heaps of fun. Then we moved, got another and demanding job and I sold my enlarger, dismantled the dark room and got rid of the brown fingers. After that various point and shoots - easy to carry - while I bought expensive radios. A brief stint in video in the eighties but that never appealed to me.
In the nineties (about 1996) I got my first digital camera, the Kodak DC50 with just under 1Mpx... It cost an arm and a leg, together with the special colour printer the equivalent of $ 3000, but fortunately I could book it on my business account as I used it for the occasional scar shot (at the time I was a PI claims lawyer). Some years after we moved to Australia in the late nineties a friend showed me his new Canon 400D.... It all came back and I got one myself, then a 50D (which I still got) and now the 5DIII.
My main interest is "recording events" - occasionally as a paid assignment - but I love to shoot the odd bird, beast or surfer in the wild (with my camera... ) and take the camera on our travels in Oz and overseas. Since two years I teach DSLR photography at the local community college, encouraging my students to get off the "Automatic" setting... It forces me to keep studying and experimenting to keep well ahead. There is not a day that I do not discover something new or pick up a new idea for our beautiful hobby.