I don't even like photography.

Photography never really interested me as I was growing up, and it was only really when cameras became digital gadgets that I started paying any attention. It also took me far, far too long to realise that just because I didn't like being in front of someone else's camera, didn't mean that I wouldn't like being behind my own.

So it was only in 2003, at the tender age of 26, that I bought my first camera; a 3MP Pentax Optio S exactly like the one my bother had got a few weeks earlier. It was an extortionate £350, but it was a cracking camera at the time, especially considering it's size. I still have it hanging around here somewhere in a peppermints tin.

The Optio saw 3 years of constant use before a colleague showed up at work with a Canon IXUS 750 or so... half the price of what I had paid for the Optio and twice as many MP (and we all know that that's the metric you should use when buying cameras, right?!). Well obviously I had to have one. Had to. Must. So I went off browsing Amazon and dpreview and came across Canon's IXUS 800 IS. Image Stabilisation AND a view finder, heaven!

Well the viewfinder ended up being fairly terrible, but on the plus side the rest of it was so good that I even ended up buying an underwater case for it, which paved the way to a lot of fun. I just wish I'd had it all for our honeymoon in 2005 - 2 weeks of diving in the Maldives.

The IXUS has served me well and is usually close by my side. It's recently found a new lease of life taking video of my daughter, Zoe, smothering her face and hair with yoghurt...



That brings me meandering to the point of of this post, why someone that wasn't remotely interested in photography 4 years previously was nervously reading reviews and pestering his geeky friends about which DSLR he should get. Well I had simply run out of buttons, dials, scales and sliders to mess around with and yearned for more. We all know that point and shoot cameras are great for some things, but they impose some pretty stringent limitations on how creative you can get with them - not to say you can't take some amazing photos with them, but DSLRs are a world of there own when it comes to Things You Can Fiddle With.

And that's important.

Right?