Cameras
I learned photography with a completely manual camera (a Graflex Graphic 35) with a handheld light meter; I used these from 6th grade well into my early college years. When I majored in art and needed to photograph my artwork, I got a used Nikon FM2, which is fully manual. It came with a 50mm lens and I splashed out on a 35-105mm zoom with macro. Around 2005, I got a Nikon Coolpix with the swivel lens and a 1 inch screen. In 2007, I acquired a Canon Powershot. Now my camera of choice is my iPhone 16.
Films
I learned photography mostly with black and white film. Initially with Kodak Plus-X and Tri-X, sometimes with Pan-X. Then I got a bulk roll of Ilford HP5 (which I was able to develop myself, having my bedroom in the basement set up as a darkroom.) In art school and thereafter, I needed to provide slides of my artwork for shows. I started with Kodachrome, then switched to Fuji Velvia and Provia.
Scanner
When I started using digital cameras, I knew I'd want to digitize my negatives and slides, so I got a Nikon Coolscan V ED. I used it occasionally, but put it into major use to digitize a lot of the images on this site. I use it with VueScan software, given that Nikon stopped supporting it over a decade ago.
"As Shot" versus Edited
I'm not a photography purist at all. If there's a tool you want to use that makes your shot better, then go for it. As a kid, photography was a very expensive hobby, so I tried to make every shot count by composing in the frame as carefully as I could. I also didn't like darkroom work that much, so the less to do later, the better. I really enjoyed the challenge of getting my exposure and composition just as I wanted at the moment the shutter clicked. But nothing ever goes as planned, so I still do editing, albeit in Lightroom now.
On this site, if I scanned a negative or a slide, I've left the black border around the image. I think that's a good way to indicate that the image is from a non-digital source. For many of these images, I haven't done any editing in Lightroom, although the settings on the scanner did do some sharpening and clean up. So you'll see some water stains on negatives, scratches, and other oddities. I'm fine with that.
My digital photos from my travels are mostly "as shot". I've done very little to no cropping, and you'll see I've left the keystoning in place for photos of architecture.
The photography of artwork, though...it's very hard to do! So I've edited as much as needed for the image to represent the artwork well. I also have cropped the images to show just a bit of the background so you know how the drawing sits on the page. Some images are scans of slides because I no longer have the artwork to re-photograph. Some images are of the artwork as it exists in its frame, through the glass. And the white balance and color rendition is always a challenge. I've done my best, but it's never quite like the original.