My Journey - Part One

So, where did it all begin? I remember procrastinating massively, spot the ADHD, about getting a camera many years ago, what like 2005? I remember getting a Casio P600 and it was an amazing bit of kit. I wish I still had it somewhere, maybe I do. It had a lens that you could stick on the end which was fascinating and it had all these different settings in to send JPEGs and it took me I don’t know how many months to get the camera in the first place and I used it for a bit, maybe a year or so.

I certainly remember taking a good few pictures with it, it was a big clunky thing. And then I, me and my then girlfriend (now wife), we used Tesco’s points (when Tesco’s points were worth a fair whack, four times the value!). We went round Europe on a Cosmos tour on a bus with a lot of old people and a small group of younger ones and it was fantastic.
It was called the Imperial Capitals. I don’t know why we picked that one because I wasn’t necessarily interested in Imperial history, but it meant we went to a lot of cities in quite a short space of time. It was seven countries in 14 nights, I know that, so maybe it was 13 capitals. But it was this madcap journey around Europe and it was fantastic and I remember getting told off for not wanting to move around on the bus because I was happy to sit at the back or the side. I didn’t really want to sit at the front of the bus but the old people wanted to move around like you’re supposed to and following the rules and all this.

It was great. Anyway, so we did all the big hits; Brussels was fantastic, Prague was fantastic, Budapest, Vienna and Berlin were amazing, and all these little places in between. And to go around Europe I needed a “big camera”. And I really wanted a Nikon D80, and I just couldn’t afford it because it was about £600 at the time. So I ended up with a Canon 400D with two kit lenses, and it was about £400 from Tesco’s as well actually.

And it came through and I used it on auto mode, on green square mode, for that whole trip around Europe. Took some awful pictures, never looked at them pretty much since, like you do with most holiday pictures. But I loved it, I loved the idea of it, I loved being able to zoom in, I loved being able to look at things a little bit differently, and it was just fascinating.

And most importantly, it gave me experience for what was just around the corner…