I have been taking photographs for over 20 years, buying my first SLR when I was about 15, a manual Fujica STX-1n which I used with some of my father's old M42 screw mount lenses and extension tubes. Rarely used now, it is still working.

In 1991 I upgraded to a second hand Minolta Dynax 8000i, closely followed by a second hand 7000i body for B&W. Excellent solid cameras, the 8000i survived a long unprotected tumble down a snow slope on Cotopaxi in Equador, and total immersion (after drying out) in a Californian stream when I fell off my mountain bike.

The move to digital happened very suddenly in November 2002 when I bought a Minolta DiMage 7 off a fellow member at the Edinbugh Photographic Society. I am ashamed to admit the half used roll of film from then still lies in my film camera!

Good though this camera was, I missed the quality and flexibility of an SLR, and the camera had terrible battery life, was extremely slow for writing RAW files and was poor for noise an anything higher than 100 ISO. So early in 2005 I took the plunge and bought the Canon EOS 20D (new!!) and some good second-hand lenses on eBay. What a fantastic camera this is- great handling, fast, and superb image quality usable up to 1600 or 3200 ISO.

I gained my Associateship of the Royal Photographic Society (ARPS) in June 2006 with a panel of 15 prints on a theme of 'Rocks in the Landscape'. These were all taken on the Canon 20D with the 10-22mm lens.