My association with photography goes back for more years than I care to remember. In my early teens I was interested in aviation (an interest which still remains today but in a slightly more relaxed way) and that would result in travelling around the UK "spotting" aircraft which would be followed by hours in the "darkroom" (bedroom) with black plastic fixed over the windows working away with the enlarger and the various trays of chemicals. I found it incredible as the image appeared before my eyes, even though the darkroom was often hot and some of the solutions didn't smell to good!
I had a fairly long career in the electricity industry working for a power company and now and again would be asked to do some technical photography, usually producing images of a piece of equipment that had suffered a failure of some kind.
A camera was usually never far away and motorsport became an additional interest, photographing Grand Prix at Brands Hatch using a Praktica 35mm SLR. In later years the advent of digital photography meant that I was able to capture images from travels to Sri Lanks, Australia and New Zealand on a little pocket size Fuji 12Mp camera (which I still have) I have now moved on to using a digital DSLR, starting out with a Nikon D5300 and then moving onto the D7100 and now the full frame D800.
My personal opinion is that there are no bad cameras around today and most people tend to stick with the brand that they started with so making the ongoing Nikon v Canon discussion pointless.
Many photographers have quite a limited range of subjects that they like to create images of but, for me, I think it's good to try most things and I like the idea of shooting several very different subjects in a week as they are likely to require very differing skill sets and that must help develop you as a photographer.