Marvolio's photostream

I am a public sector worker living in Leicester; a medium sized yet culturally diverse city in the middle of England.

I have enjoyed photography all my life. As a kid I took photos of old churches, stray cats and my pet hamster with the cheapest plastic cameras.My Dad tried to encourage me by sending me out with his old manual Pentax S2 SLR (dating from the 50's) , a hand-held Weston lightmeter and rolls of black & white film. This completely bamboozled me and while I vaguely remembered his instructions on what dials to turn based on the lightmeter I had no clue what they did or what was happening. It left me feeling that photography was too technical for me. For many years I didn't own a camera.

In 2001 I bought a Nikon point and shoot just before traveling solo around Morocco for a couple of weeks. I loved the feeling of observing closely in that alien environment and hunting down the shots. I still enjoy looking through the albums from that trip. This rekindled my interest. In 2004 I bought a Nikon F65 SLR from Dixons just shortly before they stopped selling film cameras. It had the kit zoom lens 28-80mm and with it I began to explore what effect wide angle, telephoto, UV and polariser filters had on images. In 2005 I traveled around Peru and used around 35 rolls of film over 3 weeks. All were taken in automatic modes (action, portrait etc) because I still imagined that exposure was incredibly complicated and didn't want to risk anything. The developing and printing cost a small fortune and produced a mass of prints that mostly ended up in the loft. But again many of the photos really pleased me and seemed to capture the spirit of the people and places I visited.

I continued using my F65 over the next couple of years but often neglected to get film developed. As part of my Christmas present in 2006 my girlfriend (now wife) had all my old films developed & printed and bought me several albums. I think it was while I was putting these albums together that it dawned on me that (a) I may actually have *some* ability and (b) I wanted to learn more about photography. Over the next couple of months I began borrowing how-to books from the library and dreaming of buying a Canon 30D. In February 2007 I gave up smoking and used the first two months savings to buy a Canon 350D (a 30D was about £800 then -way too expensive). This helped motivate me to stay quit and in a weird way I ended up exchanging one obsessive behaviour for another. I've been hooked ever since anyway!

Since then I have taken hundreds of thousands of photos (a few end up in Flickr), bought all sorts of gear (and sold some), set up my own bathroom darkroom (then sold it), viewed thousands of photos on Flickr, read books, magazines and masses of internet material and slowly grown my understanding of what photography is and how it works. But there is always so much more to learn both technically and creatively. As it turned out the technical stuff was much simpler than I imagined.

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