about me

When I was about 4 years old, my grandpa gave me an old Brownie lookalike. Of course taking pictures back then was child's play in the true sense of the word - they were a blurry mess, but they captured my family in everyday situations. When I look at the few prints that have survived, it's like opening a time capsule. I've been taking pictures ever since.

Another present from my late grandfather was a viewfinder camera when I was about nine or ten years old. Still, it didn't register that I could do anything with it other than record a moment in time, until at a youth club I developed my first black and white photo taken with that camera, and the resulting print of a stately house looked quite impressive.

Every now and then I was allowed to use my father's SLR, a fully manual model with an M42 screw mount. It came with 3 fixed focus lenses 35, 50 and 135 mm. Using this camera, I also learned how to use a hand-held meter.

When I was about 16, I bought myself a Minolta X-700 with a 28-210mm zoom lens from one of my first wages as an apprentice draughtsman.
This was the time when I started to become aware that a print is something that can be framed and put up on the wall, and I started to try and take pictures like that.

Over the years, my enthusiasm with photography waxed and waned, but the love was never lost. I always owned an SLR, even if it was only used for holiday snaps. When I decided to switch to digital, anything other than a SLR was really out of the question: over the years, I learned the fundamentals and techniques by taking pictures. So much so that my first autofocus lenses I ever owned were the ones I bought with my digital SLR. Until then, the tools I had available to me were aperture priority, shutter priority and manual focusing. I really needed full control, and only an SLR would provide it.

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