I honestly can't remember what my first camera was. My parents bought it for me when I was young, probably in the early 1980s. It was very compact, and black, and had a fixed lens. And the prints you got from it were these oddball square things, like 3"x3" or something. I probably have some in a box somewhere, maybe it will tell me more

It wasn't nearly as cool as my younger sister's camera though. She had an officially licensed Cabbage Patch Kids camera. Which was absolutely terrible, except for the fact that it used disposable flash bulbs, which are pretty much the coolest things in the world.

Sometime in the mid-80s my parents bought a 35mm Pentax. Film was expensive so we weren't allowed to actually shoot with it. Which was fine. Because we could play with the Flash unit which was fun! It had like a 20 second recycle time, and you could hear that high pitched whine from the transformer as it charged up the capacitor. So my sister and I would fire off the flash about 150 times, and then get yelled at when it came time to use the camera and the batteries in the flash were dead

In the late 80s I took my first (and to date, last) photography class. B&W, develope your own film and make your own prints. I think I still have all my work from there in a manilla folder somewhere. The prints are all terrible of course.

SOmetime in the mid-90s I bought a fixed 35mm Yashica that was highly reviewed by Outside or Backpacker or one of those magazines. It had a regular and a right angle viewfinder, and was small and light and easy to take along backpacking. I disappeared from my house about 10 years ago.

In the early 2000s I was at Target and had the misfortune of being talked into buying an HP Printer/Camera combo pack. It was my first digital camera. Prior to that I had only seen a Sony Digital Camera that shot VGA sized jpegs and saved them to a floppy disk. This one wasn't much of an improvement over that. It was 2MP, with a fixed lens. HP cameras at the time would eat up a set of AAs in like 8 shots (I kid you not), and the picture quality was pretty craptacular. But even considering all of those limitations it still got a lot of use. The digital convenience advantage

Next up my Dad gave me a hand-me down Sony 505V. It was 2.7MP, and had a pretty decent Zeiss lens on it. Picture quality was surprisingly good and it served me well for a while. The lack of a regular viewfinder was a major nuisance, and I never really liked having to use Sony's Memory Stick so when the Lithium batteries gave up I sold it to finance a camera upgrade

Next I made a real mistake and bought the Nikon 8800. This camera just wasn't what I wanted. It frustrated me more than anything. DSLRs were, at the time cost prohibitive (there were no sub-$1000 entry level bodies even).

October 2005 I had a brief relapse into Film when I bought a Nikon N80 and a film scanner. It is pretty primitive compared to a even an entry level DSLR these days, but it was a huge step above the best P&S Digitals of the time. I liked to shoot NPH (that's Fuji NPH 400 Film, not Neil Patrick Harris :), and Ilford HP5. About a year after I bought it the local place I bought my film from went under. Whoops.

Next up would be a Nikon D200. This would be my workhorse for the next 4 years. It's still a perfectly good camera at base ISO in 2010.

2008 I buy an iPhone. It ain't got much of a camera, but boy is it portable. A lot of my summit shots are long arms that I take with it

In early 2010 it is finally time to upgrade to a Nikon D300s. The D200 will be converted to full time Infra Red shooting