When I was a kid I was heavily involved in and interested in photography. It was the type of interest that would get me out of bed early whilst on holidays to be in place before the morning sun would rise. Often our holidays were taken in late autumn or very spring and there would be a fog around our holiday haunts. My father was the lead - having been involved in black and white photography for decades. When mum and dad built their house in the late 1950s, it included a purpose-built darkroom.
My father was a Pentax man. He had two Spotmatic bodies - a black and a silver; and he had a range of Takumar/Pentax lenses to match - a 50mm, a 105mm, a 135mm and a 500mm mirror reflex (the latter wasn’t Pentax). He also had a range of other camera gear - a Rolleiflex medium format camera that my sister used; and a Voigtländer Vitessa that I used. Generally Dad would have film in both Spotmatics - black and white in one (usually Ilford HP4) and colour slide film in the other - either Ecktachrome or Kodachrome. We went through copious volumes of film (well, I did when I was young). We used to roll our own film into plastic refillable cannisters from a larger spool.
Eventually I got (well, I won in a competition) a single lens reflex camera of my own. It was reputedly a Ricoh or Yashica that was rebadged as a Hanimex. I prised the Hanimex label off very quickly. In a couple of other photo competitions I won some cash and so one year I purchased a second-hand 28mm Pentax lens, and another year bought a Sun 85-210mm zoom lens. That kit lasted me from the late-seventies until around 1994.
In 1994 I thought it was time to ditch the Hanimex/Ricoh/Yashica. I then bought into another system - the Canon system - with a Canon EOS 500. This time I didn’t purchase a bevy of additional lenses - instead opting for the kit zoom (35-80mm) and an additional Sigma zoom (70-210mm). It served us well for around 8 years when I thought I should leap (well, step or edge carefully) into the digital age.
Having more sense than cash, I started small - with a point-and-shoot Canon PowerShot A70. It was my introduction to the digital camera. That Powershot eventually failed - to be replaced by another cheaper PowerShot (an A550 if memory serves) in mid-2007.
Fast forward to 2012. Our family was invited to holiday on a cruise and I thought it would be a shame to lose that opportunity for photos. After checking the bank balance and with my wife’s blessing we again entered into a system. The primary choices were Canon, Nikon or Pentax. I wanted a digital single lens reflex (DSLR) that would accept other lenses. Given my heritage of Pentax, and not seeing any logical differentiators between Canon, Nikon or Pentax, I chose the Pentax rabbit hole.