I have been an amateur photographer since I was 11.
I really miss the darkroom, I can't bring myself to sell the enlarger/lenses or processor even though they haven't been used for years.
OTOH producing excellent colour prints required a huge level of skill whereas using digital is about 100 billion times easier, skill wise.
Back in the day the level of skill required to get an in-focus, correctly exposed negative and produce an excellent print from it was very high, but the most important thing was always to "be standing in the right place and press the button at the right time" to paraphrase Ansel Adams and it still is, of course.
Technology has taken most of the skill out of the technical side of photography, though manual focus and exposure settings will often produce a better result in difficult conditions.
The artistic side still requires the good eye and understanding of light.
I have also collected cameras for decades and have a great interest in them as mechanical devices, in fact whilst my interest in hifi is mainly because I like listening to music my main interest in photography is fiddling with cameras.
The number of pictures people take nowadays is enormous. As a child my Dad had a camera which was only used on holidays and he rarely shot more than 1 film a year. I could afford to take about a film per month at first but never shot huge numbers but put a lot of thought into what I was trying to achieve before pressing the shutter.
Now my son takes as many pictures a day on his phone as my Dad did in a year, and I take far more in the digital era but print far fewer.
I find most modern digital cameras unnecessarily complex to use. I started with focus/aperture/shutter speed. Now there are multiple modes of each. Menu structures are often obtuse to my way of thinking. I used to use Olympus, Canon, Leica and Rollei film cameras. Rollei are long gone and of the others only the Leica has logical (to my way of thinking) controls.
Anyway as I get older I want smaller and my EOS 1Ds haven't been used for a long time I prefer a micro 4/3 Olympus when I have to carry them. The Oly 300mm f4 is tiny compared to my full frame 600mm f4 and the results in real world shooting conditions are at least as good.
I am quite impressed by the Sony A7 since it can be used with other makers lenses and adapters too.
