My hobby
My greatest and most expensive hobby is photography.
I started in 1973 using a Mamiya Sekor 500 TD with a 50mm f/2 normal lense.
I have no idea of how many rolls of Tri-X went through that camera. We bought the film in rolls of 10 or 20 meters, I can't remember the exact length, and then loaded it into Ilford cassettes (they could be opened with a bottle opener, and closed again).
The Mamiya was stolen in Spain in 1976, and for many years I had no camera. From 1981 to 1998 an Olympus XA was the PS camera of choice. Before a 2 week journey to Madeira in 1999 I decided an SLR was needed.
Through the skills of a sales person I ended up with a Nikon F70 (N70 in the US). Unfortnately his skills made me buy 2 Sigma consumer lenses, a 28-80 and a 100-300. The 100-300 is the worst lense I have ever owned or used. After a year or so I bought a 50mm f/1.4, and the 2 Sigmas haven't been used since.
The 50mm was followed by a 180mm f/2.8, a 105mm f/2.8 Sigma EX and a 24mm f/2.8.
When the D70 came out and made the DSLR affordable to ordinary photographers, I went digital.
The D70 is the most costly investment ever! I think I speak for many "amateurs" here. Learning with a DSLR is much faster than with a film SLR, feed back is in seconds, not weeks! This gives a taste for better lenses and in my case longer reach! Wanting to shoot wildlife I after long considerations ended up buying a 200-400 f/4 VR, this in turn demanded for a new tripod, tripod head, and finally a D2x. This in turn called for a 12-24 f/4 Tokina and a 70-200 f/2.8 VR and lately the 24-70 f/2.8.
Who am I
My name is Knud Christensen.
I was born in 1952 in the village Nybøl just north of the Danish-German border.
I went to school in a small village school with about 100 pupils.
After high school in Sønderborg I went to Aarhus where I studied medicin (like 900 others that year). I found out it wasn't really me, panicked, and started at the teachers college in Tønder in the south west of Jutland.
I studied there from 1972 to 1976. Through my math teacher Børge Christensen (not a relative) I came into a project developing an interpreter for the programming language COMAL (COMmon Algorithmic Language). This was part of an idea Børge had together with Benedict Løfstedt for introducing computer science in elementary schools.
In 1976 I started my professional career at Regnecentralen where I stayed for 16 years. During that time I worked with operating systems, compilers, communication software, and even micro coding a floating point divide. Yes, we were still developing our own computers at that time (1991).
In 1992 I started in my current job at ABB where I am developing software for various control systems for district heating systems, off shore power generating wind mill parks etc.
So one could say that my main occupation is to reduce CO2 emission :-).
This is how I look after a 5 hour stroll in the mountains, waiting for a cold beer :-)