Shane: What got you started into photography?

Matt: Good question. It wasn't actually planned. I might be slightly older than I may appear on YouTube. Maybe not, depends on how the camera treats me. But I actually was using a film a child, but not knowingly. I was just using my parents' camera just to take snaps. And then through university we had disposable film cameras.

And then I think early two thousands, I bought my first digital camera. And even then, it wasn't for photography, it was just more as a tool, like you'd have a phone. I was going traveling, so, I thought “you should probably have a camera”. So I took a camera to India and that was a, Optio S4 I think. It was like a little compact. I still didn't really know if I liked photography or anything like that.  

Then maybe some years later ex-girlfriend bought me a little Lumix TZ 20, maybe it was written somewhere, one of the blogs, again, not a hundred percent. And then this time around it really clicked and by the Easter, that was actually the Christmas,  then by the Easter, I had already asked her nicely, if she minded if I upgraded, so then I bought another camera and bought the… one of the very first mirrorless cameras, which is the Lumix G1, which was one of the first bridge cameras, which means you could have the interchangeable lenses. That thing really kick-started the whole thing in terms of looking at lenses on eBay even back then. And kind of mounting vintage lenses onto the micro four thirds, but I'd never had any kind of formal training and I didn't study photography at school.

I did science at university.  So, I had to teach myself, I didn't know what f-stops where, I didn't know what shutter speed was. I didn't know anything. So then, how to I say… painfully, but I enjoyed the learning process. I had to teach myself photography before I could get slightly better than what I was.

At the time Flickr was pretty popular back them. And so, I was posting my early kind of snapshots to Flickr and that worked, a really amazing learning platform where people were looking at my images and saying, “Oh, you probably need to change your white balance and things like that”.

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