Flickr: geraldkhoo

Photography has been something I was interested in since my childhood, remembering my aunts and uncles taking photos with their Minolta cameras. I remembered joining the photography club back in secondary school only to find that it cost me an arm and a leg just to develop a roll of film. For a secondary school student who had $20 of pocket money a week, it was not something I could continue doing, so after a some time, I decided to put it aside. Along my journey in life, I tried to pick up the hobby, but the cost of developing film was something I still could not upkeep.

In 2007, a friend was taking picture at some events and I asked him if I could try it out. He was using a Canon 5D, and I loved it! That rekindled my interest in photography and after much consideration, I went out to buy my first DSLR on 2 June 2007, a Nikon D40x. It was so much fun learning photography.

After a month or so, I exhausted my D40x, and decided to sell it... and bought a 2nd hand D200... and loved every minute of it! I can say that the passion to capture life in a picture did live on in me even though I could not afford it when I was younger.

My wife saw the interest I had in photography, and on 18 Jan 08, she came home and gave me the biggest surprise yet... a Nikon D300! I was in a state of shock the whole night and kept asking her "Why you buy?" knowing that it was an expensive camera. So I sold my D200 in that weekend and am very happy with my D300!

Around the 2nd half of 2008, I was introduced to Strobist by my friend Woon Lay (Yapster), and started to discover the world of using small hot shoe flashes as portable lighting to pictures I take. I was inspired by David Hobby, Joe McNally and Zack Arias. Early 2009, I decided to start a blog for this purpose... sgstrobist.blogspot.com. Do have a look at the blog :-)

On a short getaway trip to Kuala Lumpur in Nov 2010... I decided to buy the D700 camera. This brings me one step forward into the full-frame DSLR world. I was contemplating at that time whether to buy the soon-to-be released D7000 (with all the great publicity of what it is capable of), but after trying it out in the Nikon Showroom in KL's Bejaya Time Square, I found that my large sized hands would fit better with the D700, and jumped right in! Besides, the D700 at that time is already a tried and tested camera, and it has not disappointed me!