I referred to this briefly on the “about me” page however a little more detail seems appropriate.
Hardware
I did have a 35mm film slr with a couple of fairly high magnification lenses some years ago. At the time I did quite a lot of birdwatching so trying to photograph them seemed like a good idea. However the time taken to get a film developed meant any opportunity for improving a picture was long gone and the enthusiasm waned.
The first digital camera was an Olympus mju 400 which I got in 2004 I think. It produced pretty good results and I have a set of photos from a holiday in Ireland in 2005 which still look good now. I tend not to be impulsive but I saw an Olympus mju mini and fell for it! Not the best camera in the world but it was so small it did mean I carried it with me far more that I would have done something larger which was a good habit to get into.
The Panasonic FX-01 from 2007 was a great step for me. Genuinely compact so I did carry it with me and producing some very good images without any editing required. It is still is use now as it fits easily into a pocket. Particularly useful for lousy weather as it is easy to keep dry and gigs where it is unobtrusive.
Early last year I decided to spend more time on photography and to get a dslr. I wish I had known then what I know now however I am not sure the outcome would have been different. The Sony alpha 350 decision was influenced by a number of factors. However among those were were “true live view” (useful but not as useful as I thought it was), tilt-able lcd screen (useful) and the fact that stabilisation was in camera not lens (jury is out on that one). I had to take quite a lot of images before I was getting ones I was satisfied with but that was my fault not the camera’s.
The lens decision was influenced by the fact that I did not want to carry too much with me when walking across moorland etc and that I wanted a good range of magnification. The Tamron 18-200 lens has proved a good choice for the job. It gives good wide angle images and allows a high level of zoom. It does suffer from some chromatic aberration sadly but that is fixable and anything much better would have cost a lot more.
A 2010 update – the Panasonic met with an accident early in January to my sorrow. It has now been replaced with another Panasonic “point & shoot”, a TZ-65 (basically a TZ-6) as a backup camera. The choice was quite simple really – the Lumix range uses Leica lenses with a wide angle capability and a good optical zoom. So far this looks like a very good replacement indeed and is in my pocket on occasions when the Sony is not with me.
Software
Over the years I have made use of a number of pieces of software for image editing going back to earlier versions of PaintShop Pro and including various free programs I came across.
More recently I have used Serif PhotoPlus x2 and x3 and Elements 6 (it came with the photo course). To me they all have their failings and certainly are not very intuitive. I decided to explore some other options and installed a trial version of Adobe Lightroom. 24 hours later I was hooked 
.
While it is not strictly a photo editor I’ve found I can do the vast majority of what I want within it. It is great for evaluating sets of images with a number of features allowing comparisons to be made. Throw in good scoring, easy tagging/meta data work, exporting etc etc and I doubt I will be looking for anything else for a while. I now also have Photoshop cs4 so will be getting to grips with that over time.
Image utilities and other software
There are plenty out there however these are some that I currently use and find helpful.
Exif Pilot lite is very useful if you want to look at all/any exif data for all the files in a directory. It has an “explorer” like interface, is easy to use and does a good job. Some what redundant if using Lightroom but a useful utility anyway.
I take quite a lot of panoramas and have tried one or two programs for stitching images. The best so far is Hugin. It allows a lot of user input but equally does the job automatically most of the time. Microsoft’s own utility (MSCE) is good for a quick look and is actually a little more tolerant than Hugin in awkward cases.
I have taken quite a few images of buildings and had some difficulty getting the perspectives absolutely correct. Artistic approaches aside it is one area of photography where it is important to get it right. After a bout of frustration with one image I was pointed to ShiftN by someone and I have found it very useful indeed. Part of the toolbox I guess.
Finally – for now – I am shooting RAW images mostly now. There is a penalty in burst mode which I find unacceptable but the ability to recover details from images where the exposure is not right makes up for the size penalty the rest of the time. I do not find Adobe RAW support for the Sony all that good however Sony’s own processing is good but is really not intuitive or well laid out. While I have tried of software Adobe support his improved with the latest release and the integration with Lightroom makes it easy to use that method. The majority of my images are now from RAW files.