I read this today and it got me thinking about how things have changed (advanced?) over the years in the world of photography.

I’ve been a keen photographer for many years - since I was a schoolkid actually - and I’ve owned a number of cameras… each purporting to be the latest and greatest in photographic technical innovation. I think it’s also safe to say that I’ve always been a bit of a gearhead: I like owning the kit just as much as using it.

My first camera - I think - was the ubiquitous Kodak Instamatic, which used 126 film. I think 126 was just 35mm film in a big easy to load cartridge and the pictures that came out of it were pretty good… considering.

I was then given a 110 camera for my birthday. It was a sexy beast: slim and flat and advancing the film by sliding the two halves of the camera together, made it feel like some sort of James Bond spy camera. Cool!  But the pictures that came out of it were a bit crap.

A Kodak Disc camera was then foistered upon me.  New and innovative, it promised wonderful snaps in a camera that could fit in your shirt pocket.  Fit in my shirt pocket, it did. Produce wonderful snaps, it didn’t. Worse than the 110.

Then I started work at the Telephone Exchange and suddenly had more money than I knew what to do with.  I went straight down to our local camera shops (for, in them days, unlike now, there were many in town) and I splashed out on a Canon AE-1 Program SLR.   The shopkeeper made me buy it, as a result, but wow,  what a gorgeous piece of kit!  And from that point on, huge sums of money were frittered away on lenses, filters, flashguns and every - and any - accessory I could lay my hands on.

Then the next latest innovation came along: autofocus.  “Ooh, I want one of those!”

A Canon EOS 650 was subsequently purchased and all my old kit was traded in, as it wasn’t compatible.

A couple of years later, I got interested in developing my own films and built a darkroom up in the loft. I tinkered with colour and slidefilm processing, but discovered a real affinity for black and white. So much so, that I went out and bought another camera body - a Canon 50e with gimmicky eye-controlled autofocus that I never used - just so I could have one camera body permanently loaded with colour and one with black and white film.  When we went away on holiday, my camera bag was huge and bloody heavy!

And then the new digital cameras came along. “Ooh, I want one of those.”

Once again, all my kit was swapped out and I opted for a Canon Eos 10D (you’ll have gathered by now that I’ve always been a Canon fan) as my first foray into the world of digital, but then I upgraded a while back (for no real reason other than I wanted to) to  a Canon 40D.

Newer, more advanced cameras now come on the market regularly, but at the moment, I’m quite happy with my lot.

But I daresay that in ten years time, holographic cameras will be the new in-thing. “Ooh, I’ll want one of those.”