In my previous post I shared the various film (or analogue) cameras I used between the 1980s and 2002 and it was an interesting journey.

Having said that by 2002 digital kit was becoming more available and more affordable so I did decided to trade my Nikon gear and buy some Canon kit.

A friend had recommended the Canon Power Shot G2 compact camera which had a zoom range between 35mm and 70mm which could be expanded with wide angle and telephoto adapters although the resulting quality was not brilliant.

As I recall, when I opened the files, they were 11MB which seemed pretty good at the time. As I recall the file size we used to send to the national papers when I was working at the news agency was 4MB.

Needless to say it served me well and produced some decent shots on various assignments including travelling to Norway to collect a donor heart, the 60th anniversary of Operation Market Garden and Up Helly Aa.

By 2005 the chief photographer of the Scunthorpe Telegraph suggested that a Canon Power Shot Pro 1 might be a decent upgrade. At eight mega pixels it could produce images which were twice the size of the G2 and it had a much wider zoom range.

And a year later I had an inheritance in late 2006 and it was stressed that I should use the money for something that I could enjoy so obviously that would be a camera.

After talking to the photographers at the Scarborough Evening News their suggestion was the Nikon D80. It was a decent DSLR and complimented the Canon compact camera.

Having said that when I was due to head out to Afghanistan I decided to take the camera from the Whitby Gazette rather than my own gear, a Nikon D1 as I recall, and I was pleased I did because when I got back to the UK the sensor had a fair chunk of the Helmand desert attached to it.

In 2012 I upgraded my compact camera and bought a a Fujifilm X10. At the time the company was releasing a range of very retro looking cameras.

It had the look and feel of a rangefinder camera from a bygone era and a short zoom lens. The results were decent and I quite liked the colours that the Fuji sensor produced. As I recall you could even set it to recreate the look of various Fuji films from earlier decades.

And in 2015 I swapped the D80 for another in the Fujifilm range the X-Pro1. It was like a larger version of the X10 and you could change the lenses.

Again the results were quite good and it still had the option to recreate the look and feel of older Fuji films.

Having said that a year later I decided, for a number of reasons, to take the plunge and actually buy a Leica rangefinder camera.

I had wanted one since the mid-1990s as a couple of my photographer friends had an M6 and they really rated it.

Leica had produced a digital version which looked just like the older film models and these days I mainly use just two lenses – a 28mm and a 50mm with the option of a 35mm – and the camera is a joy to use as it is so intuitive and the shutter is unbelievably quiet.

Having said that I had booked a holiday in Russia in 2018 where I would be visiting both Moscow and St Petersburg.

I was looking to the trip and that year the theme of my two holidays was very much Cold War as I also had a long weekend in Berlin.

However, shortly afterwards the whole Salisbury novichok poisoning situation erupted and the British politicians were increasingly escalating tensions between the UK and Russia by threatening Putin – the main offender of course was none other than Boris Johnson.

Bizarrely, yet understandably, I was also growing increasingly concerned that the security of my hotel room during the trip might be compromised so I looked for an alternative cheaper set of kit.

A mate recommended Panasonic Lumix cameras and I opted for a GX-9 and a GX-80 with the equivalent of 28mm and 50mm lenses attached.

The kit was a lot lighter and smaller than the Leica equipment but I have to admit the results were rather good.

Needless to say as well as traditional cameras I have always had a camera on whatever phone I had at the time and I currently have an iPhone so these days it is a lot easier to carry a camera all the time.

Recently, I have been considering trying film again but do I really want to cope with the inconvenience and expense? I know going back to the limit of 36 frames per roll of film would make you consider every shot when compared with the luxury of a memory card with the capacity of of 1000s of photos. So we shall see eh?