Apparently, according to my mum, I'm now a professional photographer, so I guess this little hobby of mine deserves its own section!
I've been taking casual photos for years, as all teens do, but definitely not enthusiastically, or at every possibility like some teenagers. In fact I didn't take many photos at all before I studied A-level Photography at college, aged 17.
The reason I decided to leap straight into an artistic A-level is quite simple: I lacked somewhere to vent my artistic tendencies. I hadn't taken a single artistic GCSE (all the sciences), and I hadn't taken any artistic classes previously... but I had always found situations and places to be artistic: playing piano and guitar, amateur dramatics, website and graphic design.
But I wanted something formal, to hopefully capitalise on the artistic 'eye' that I had. So I took up photography. I learnt how to take photos.
It's really quite easy. You have a light-tight box. You have a shutter at the front... You can control how big that hole is, and how long you open the shutter for. That's, shockingly, about it... So, I learnt how to control the shutter and the aperture, and how to achieve some fairly simple effects. I did pretty well, and I left college for university.
I've been taking photos ever since.
I shoot with a selection of prime lenses (always quality over quantity!) with both standard film and digital Canon EOS cameras.