I am an amateur photographer living in Gothenburg, Sweden.
It all started with my dad's old Minolta Hi-Matic F in the seventies and a book he had about amateur photography.
I read about composition, depth of field, exposure and processing, though I never got a dark room.
Later I started using his even older camera with only manual exposure, and tried to get it right.
Then I bought my first camera, a Dynax system camera with a few lenses, and started for real with diapositive film, taking mostly landscapes and nature.
Later in the nineties, I did a lot of travels with my good friend Mattias, a few of them lasting for several months backpacking in Asia and North America.
This led me in to travel photography, still using diapositive slides. We always tried to avoid the x-ray scanners in airports, in an almost paranoid matter, as a measure to protecting the film. This did not always work out, but I am not sure whether it had to do with the x-ray or the heat in our backpacks during several moths of travel.
As he was a quite talented photographer, I got a lot of inspiration from him, and I improved both in composition and mainly in the difficult field of finding the good object.
This is something that has haunted me ever since, and probably is one of the greater challenges for all photographers: finding the perfect object.
No matter how good your technique is, if it isn't an interesting object that you have captured, the picture is not that outstanding in the end.
I still try my best in this matter.
Then came a new millennium and the digital revolution.
I caught the train, and bought myself one of the first wide-spread digital compacts, that I used alongside my old analog Dynax, a Canon Ixus, 1st generation.
It took some years, but finally I upgraded to a DSLR, which I still use - my old and dusty EOS 400D.
I started with Photoshop and Lightroom, and gradually learnt more by trial and error, later on also with the help of well written books.
Then I joined Flickr, and this had a deep impact, since the site is virtually crowded with good photos, from advanced amateurs to professionals.
I have completely abandoned the analog world of photography, since I don't have either time or space for a dark room.
The fascination for processing in Photoshop and other software, led to an obvious over-manipulation and experimenting at first.
Now I look back at these picture with a slight giggle, but I believe that it was in this playfulness that I also learned a lot, even though the results from then aren't what I am after today.