Flickr: altitudezero

I have been excited by taking pictures for as long as I can remember. I wrote on a blog somewhere once, about thinking back to 10, 15 maybe 20 years ago. To the days when my camera was a plastic point and shoot affair, won in a school summer fair raffle. To be fair, it did an amazing job considering the amount of time it spent in a Camelbak, bouncing down the side of a large rock strewn hill, through streams, extreme heat and pouring rain, shooting cheap film in difficult light conditions to be developed at the local supermarket... But they were long summer days of perfect vistas from hard earned hilltops. These mind's eye sketches would be seen through the plastic view finder, projected onto the film more through enthusiasm than photographic ability and the patient wait for the prints to return would seem so long. And though the results are still marvellous today - pure atmosphere of innocent days - how it would be frustrating to not always see in them what was in my head when I glanced through that little window.

At 21 I got a grown up camera, a Pentax SLR without stupid picture modes. I learned aperture and shutter priority, I loved the fake panoramic crops it did, I imagined cinematographic vistas. It is funny how the shape of a frame makes you see different pictures. That camera went with me anytime I went anywhere interesting (apart from the time I left it at Heathrow airport in a 6am daze… but that was OK, I picked it up on my return journey and even got a couple of interesting shots of Lisbon with another dirt cheap p&s).

Then, came a small silver plastic box not so different from that point-and-shoot I used to carry around, only this time with a magic screen on the back that gave instant photographs. How it is easy now to get the shot that you actually have in your head. You see what you have taken, you can blow it up, crop it, process it straight away and e-mail it to your friends to amaze them. You can share it on Flickr. If you are really lucky, someone you have never met will gleefully shout 'Great Capture!'. For me 2005 was probably the year that the 21st came to be different from the previous century.

And now I have been shooting lots for almost 6 years, with my venerable, vintage Nikon D100 then a D200, now a 5D MkII or an iPhone, and I feel that the challenge remains the same as ever... To recreate what no-one else would ever quite see if I didn't manage to pull it out of that clever box of tricks and onto this monitor.