Walking past the local camera shop on Valentine’s Day, I saw they had decorated their wares with little hearts. Romance was in the air and I was trying to remember when I first fell in love.

I vividly remember taking my first photo with my mother’s Box Brownie. It shows two boys posed wonkily against a wooden fence, the horizon tipped at an angle, the whole thing fuzzy from camera shake. I was hooked. The seductive click of the mechanical shutter confirmed I was in control of the technology. Also as photographer I was (briefly) in control of my two older siblings.

The Box Brownie required a certain amount of expertise when loading film. Under no circumstances could the awkward roll film be allowed to unwind itself in the bright sunshine. Things progressed when I acquired a Kodak Instamatic with film cassette that could be dropped into the back of the camera. The results were less than totally satisfying artistically speaking. Some imagination was required to see the family cat, a blackish dot in the midst of a tangle of grass, as a wild animal stalking its prey through the jungle, but I had that imagination. Unlike my permanently unimpressed family.

I progressed on to a sturdy Canon A1 which a relative picked up in Singapore. It included a variety of gadgets - lens doublers, close-up bellows, a wide-angle lens and an excellent telephoto or two. I regretted that my pocket money did not stretch to the Canon fisheye, but the rest of the kit saw me through art college. Like the other students I visited Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire where William Henry Fox Talbot made some of the very first pinhole exposures. I had a brief dalliance with my own hand-made pinhole camera, but the modern cameras felt much more sophisticated. Photography had come a long way since those early days hadn’t it?

A love affair with cruising rapidly down snowy mountains on skis meant that something less bulky than the A1 was required. I purchased an electronic compact in the shape of a slightly pricey, but beautifully engineered Contax T2. I saw the same model in an engineering display in the Science Museum a year later. The very first version of Photoshop software had now arrived and I now had the option of having a digital version of my transparencies saved to CDRom when processing the film. Manipulating photos on computer put me back in the creative driving seat. But the roller-coaster ride was not over. After a couple of encounters with borrowed digital cameras, I cast aside my beautiful Contax, and took up with a little Canon Ixus which has been my faithful companion for the last three years.

With all this rapid technological change it is easy to be dazzled by the latest development. When running courses, I frequently take my old Box Brownie with me. Cameras still have lenses, shutters, viewfinders (well some do), a compact and portable box, image counter etc. Photography is not just about how many megapixels your camera packs. It’s about having luck, finding locations, looking, using light and yes, about capturing life and loving what you do.