Mike began down the photography path many years ago using a Kodak Tele-Disc camera. The film was in discs and was very grainy, it had no adjustable focusing (set for infinity permanently). The thought of changing the f-stop, exposure and the like were far from this camera’s capability. Fortunately, those things were far from Mike’s mind at this age, and so he was happy!

His interest in photography came and went as he entered his teens, when typical teenage things (very few of which were good for him) grew to be “more important”. However one day out of the blue his father presented his Minolta XD-5, which Mike had drooled over in his younger days, as a gift to Mike. This re-stoked the creative fires greatly!

As his technical ability and experience increased, Mike decided to plunge into debt and on a snap decision purchased a Nikon Coolpix 4500 4MP digital camera. The wonders of not having to develop film, of having a nice small camera to take anywhere and snap off hundreds of redundant shots in a day was magic! It’s ability to do macro photography has (and remains so) been amazing, very sharp and defined and able to put the camera on the ground to shoot! However the Coolpix 4500 was limited in many ways by it’s lack of ease of use in the manual adjustment area, the very small lens causing the “everything in focus, all the time” scenario…after a few years it was time to move on and up!

Next on the roster was a Canon Digital Rebel (300d), which was so much closer to what Mike had been craving! Lens purchases abounded suddenly as his proficiency grew with the new piece of equipment, and it was good. This has been a great camera and is still in use now as a backup camera.

The latest that Mike has now is a Canon 20d, offering largely a similar product to the Digital Rebel, with simply amazingly low noise at high ISO, and very clean pictures. Far less (in fact, none most of the time) post processing in Photoshop with this one, things are just so sharp and defined (when you want them to be). It’s been great to use, the only drawback is it weighs over 3lbs with a Tamron 24-70 lens on it.

As for lenses and such, Mike owns a Canon 17-54 (kit lens from the Rebel), a Canon 50mm 1.8 prime, Sigma 70-300 ubercheap-zoom (very nice quality surprisingly), and his primary lens is a Tamron 24-70 2.8 XR Di. The Tamron has been amazing, though it’s a heavy beast. Sharp, great bokeh, sounds fantastic when the shutter is pressed. Good stuff all round! A few polarizers are kicking around in his camera bag as well however they aren’t used much.