My father had photography as a hobby for most or all of my life, and I guess I got it from him. I remember him using a Canon AE-1 when I was a youth – I only had a Kodak 110 Tele-Ektra at that point. As an adult, I eventually got various Canon PowerShot point-and-shoot digital cameras, then got an Elan 7 film SLR. In 2003, IEEE Spectrum used one of my photos.
In early 2004, I got a Nokia 3650 smartphone – one of the first in the US to have a camera. I took it with me on a long bike ride up the coast that February, holding it at arm's length to take photos of myself with surrounding scenery.
Four months later, I received an email from someone I'd never heard of, who led a team I'd never heard of. He had found my blog post, looked at more of my blog, and wanted to discuss where to bike while vacationing where I lived... and also his team's need for a photographer/techie to do occasional work, all over the world.
I joined the team a couple months later, right around the time I started working around space science. For over a decade, I alternated between operating and using astronomical telescopes and cameras, and flying places to take photos. In fairly short order, I picked up the first of a few Canon Digital Rebel DSLRs, and some EF lenses, mainly mid-range USM ones.
Flying around meant I took a lot of photos of airliners, and one of them made it into the UK aviation magazine Air International in 2007. The DSLRs also came in handy for taking a lot of pictures of observatories doing their things, which led to a photo of the Keck Observatory's twin lasers making it into the French science magazine La Recherche in 2013, and a photo of the Keck and Subaru lasers wound up in the 3rd edition of the Encyclopedia of the Solar System in 2015.
I also upgraded to phones with gradually better cameras - a Palm Treo 650, an iPhone 3G, and so on. I stopped flying around the world in late 2015, and although I still enjoy photography, these days I mostly use my phone to shoot photos and videos of scenery and my family.