As a first post on steemit that's as good a title as any. I am a 42 year old photographer from Scotland in the UK. Well, Scotland is currently in the UK. That may well change in the near future, and the UK will cease to be. It will be as dead as Monty's parrot. Something that has been building in tandem with anger at Westminster generally, and austerity policies like the bedroom tax specifically.
I first became interested in photography as a teenager when I got a cheap little point and shoot for my birthday. I took photos of my friends and I hanging around, skateboarding, just generally mucking about. A few years later I went to college to study photojournalism but didn't complete the course. I left photography behind for about ten years or so after that. In the meantime I had gotten married and started a family. So family snapshots led me back to photography, from family snaps to photographing the Edinburgh Fringe, which led to my interest in documentary/street photography. So somehow I'd circled back to photojournalism really.
So once I finally got my first DSLR I decided to return to college to learn new things, and to re-learn what I'd perhaps forgotten. From there I got back into shooting film too, and bought a nice Nikon F3, which is such a great camera. It really feels like a camera in the hand.
Although there's no reason why you can't shoot street with a DSLR, or SLR for that matter, which until recently I had been doing as these were the cameras I had (and as the saying goes the best camera is the one you have with you), they are big and bulky, not very discreet, and it can get tiring lugging them around all day. Which is why I finally got my hands on a RICOH GR last month, specifically for street photography.
I can certainly see why so many street shooters love the GR. I will be shooting the upcoming Jazz Festival in Edinburgh with it next weekend, and looking forward to it.