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Hi, All. My wife spotted this forum and signed me up. Is that legal? Anyway, photography is about to become a big part of my life again after a long lay off. I got into it initially in the mid-seventies when a friend casually mentioned he'd been bought a beginner's darkroom kit as a birthday or Christmas present, but never touched it. We pooled our pocket money to buy chemicals and got going in his dad's tool cupboard. A year or two later I bought my first SLR, a Zenit B. I shot mainly B&W in those days, but as a special treat I put a roll of Kodachrome through it. ISO 25 meant a tripod for nearly everything. In my early twenties I was at college and using an OM1; in my first year of work I upgraded to a second-hand OM2 (sadly, not the beautiful black version) and built up a small collection of Olympus lenses. I also acquired a very second-hand Mamiya medium-format camera a few years later which I used for portraiture, having a superb north-facing skylight in my flat living room. I even painted up a roll of canvas from friend's art department to make a rudimentary backdrop. Living in North Wales at the time meant weekend trips to Snowdonia for landscapes was a great option, even if the vagaries of the weather meant sometimes not a single frame got exposed. I had access to a pretty good darkroom at that time and punished myself with marathon sessions in there. When marriage and children came along, and demands on my salary diverted just about all available cash into grown-up stuff, time and resources for my hobby dimished. I sold my kit and adopted a point-and-shoot lifestyle. We migrated to digital in 2001 with a Canon G2, by which time we had a PC, of course, and suddenly photo editing and retouching was unbelievably more convenient. I haven't peed in a sink since going digital. But two weeks ago I got my Christmas and birthday presents in one - a Nikon D200 camera body. What a thing of beauty it is. Frustratingly, I still have no lens. I've set my heart on the 18-200mm VR zoom, but tried getting one of those lately? I'm hoping to get hold of an 18-70 in the interim, and soon, so I can start using the camera. You'll be sure to see me on these forums when I do. Looking forward to it.
hi and welcome.
to TP Forums Mr P ... 
