Howdy, y'all! I'm Laurie, a Canadian expat (from all over Western Canada) living in Sri Lanka.
I got my first film camera, a Kodak with 126 film, I believe, back in, oh, 1978 or 1979, which was when photography first bit me. Then I got a job working in a camera store in 1988, both selling cameras and developing film. That was a great experience - I got to play with all the camera equipment, encouraged by the boss so we could become better salespeople, plus working in the lab, I learned a bit about analysing pictures to see what was good and what didn't work for when the customers asked. Huge learning experience.
I bought a Minolta X7A - only camera I could afford as a poor starving university student. I used that camera extensively over the next decade and a half, along with my brother's Canon when he let me borrow it.
When I moved to Sri Lanka in 2003 (to marry my husband), I had to give up the film pictures since film and processing is so relatively very expensive here, so I started using the hubby's digital camera, which, in all honesty, he never touched since because I had so firmly co-opted it.
His digital camera was an early Nikon Coolpix, bought a couple of years before I got here.
Three years ago, we bought me another Nikon P&S, a Coolpix S10 with a 10x optical zoom. Lovely little camera that's done well for me. I've shot somewhere around 7500 pics with it in the last three years, and more than half were in the last year. I had major health issues starting a few years before, so I wasn't taking as many photos, but this year has been much better in that regard.
We're looking at getting me a DSLR, and I'm currently leaning towards a Nikon D90, but I still have a lot of research to do before I finalize. I've been at the point of being severely limited by a P&S for a long time.
The hubby things I take some great photos. I think I have a lot to learn. I don't think I have much of an artistic eye - my sister's a true artist, as are several cousins, and they're all amazing. Me, I just putter around and pretend a lot. I'd like to reach the point where I'm not pretending any more.
As for what I photograph...
We live far enough out of the city, Colombo, that we're jungle enough. In our neighborhood, we have purple-faced langurs, monitor lizards, chameleons, wandering cows of every description, and a whole heap of birds of a lot of different colours. Then there are the insects, also many and varied, and the flowers and plants. I photograph all of it. Madly.
I've got an obscene number of photos of just cows. And the rose-ringed parakeets, and the purple-faced langurs, and the lizards. No, I just have an obscene number of photos.
Anyway, enough of the rambling...