The first serious camera I had, like many people, was a second-hand Zenit E, heavy and you had to remember to manually stop down before taking a photo. But importantly it was in matt-black. I used it for O-level photography but have very few negatives from this period and doubt that there would be much worth printing anyway.
Many of the older photographs on this site were taken with an autofocus Pentax MZ-10 and its kit zoom lens, a reasonable entry level camera. This combination was quite cheap and light and was capable of good results, especially portraiture.
When both the camera and lens died, virtually simultaneously, and were declared to be either too expensive to repair or actually irreparable (in the case of the lens) in the short term I bought an old Pentax ME to mount the remaining few KAF lenses I had.
Longer term I decided to switch to Nikon, rejecting the idea of buying another modern plastic camera and bought a secondhand F3, the last manual focus Nikon professional camera. Which I hope will last for decades. I also renounced zoom lens, decided to walk more, and bought prime lenses instead; some second-hand, some new. Especially in black-and-white, it took me a while to cope with the generally greater contrast of these lenses. Now I generally under-rate a film by a 1/3 of a stop and pull the development a little.
The medium format images have been taken with a Bronica SQ-Ai in the belief that this would lead to greater quality and more consideration which it generally does. Medium format certainly slows you down, I know that's often said and it was true in my case and in fact it's slowed down the rate that I shoot 35mm film too. This camera gives a 2¼" square negative which makes a change from the classic 135 format 3:2 proportion. I use it with the waist level finder only, which again makes for a change in how the camera is used and how you compose. It also made me appreciate more the ease of use of a, relatively, compact 35mm SLR. Something which seems to have been forgotten with modern professional cameras, film or digital.
The great majority of the black and white film I've taken has been on HP5+. I've experimented with the newer technology films as well as more specialist ones, but ultimately I prefer HP5's tonality and quality. Its flexibility means I have used it most of the time. You can expose it at anything between 200 ASA to 1600 and develop it in pretty much anything. Most recently I've settled on Kodak T-MAX but in the past have used most of the Ilford developers and found them to be perfectly satisfactory. HP5+ and T-MAX gives good shadows and reasonable grain, although I don't object to grain.
For a long while I used almost exclusively black and white, shooting colour really only for snaphots until I started using medium format, since then I've vacillated between the Kodak Portra and Fuji 160 films. Can't decide which I prefer.
I print both black and white and colour. Over the years I've used a few public darkrooms; at college in Bath, at f-stop (Bath) and at the RPS (again, Bath). Since moving from Somerset, I've been a member of Photofusion. They've got the best public facilities I know of and is frequented by clever and helpful people if you want to chat and swap ideas.
When I was studying A-level in Bath, split-grade printng was demonstrated, in a rather simple and mechanical way and although I tried it I didn't see any benefit at the time over printing at a single grade. More recently I was given as a present a copy of a book entitled Way Beyond Monochrome by Lambrecht & Woodhouse, which contains some very good chapters on split-grade printing. I also stumbled across an interesting article by Les Mclean. These both inspired me to try again, properly.
Colour printing is made harder because I'm colour blind, although I have done incredibly badly in colour-blindness tests, in everyday life it hasn't been such a problem, but it is obviously a handicap when it comes to identifying a colour cast in the darkroom. Sometimes I ask the opinion of other darkroom users or, since I can usually tell whether a print is too warm or too cold, I print in all the principle "warmer" or "colder" directions and am usually then able to see which direction is removing the veil of the colour cast.
For black and white I have always used Ilford Multi-Grade IV, work prints and prints for scanning on resin-coated and exhibition work printed on fibre-base. Fairly recently I've started selenium toning prints for longevity and to increase the maximum black of fibre prints.
Regards colour papers I usually use the Kodak portra papers for the choice of contrast that the range of papers gives.
Some of the images illustrating articles were taken with digital cameras, but I don't own one myself. Every image in the gallery's a scan of a silver print. I enjoy the magic of a darkroom too much to make much more use of digital methods than that, it's convenient.