I was introduced to Blender around '06, but did not start using it seriously until about 8 years later (thanks to Andrew Price). I am mainly interested in the cycles render engine and creating photorealistic images. I love making complicated shaders with cycles's awesome node editor.
Before Blender I used 3ds Max for about a year. I switched to Blender mainly because of are the awesome community Blender has, though I also love cycles and the nodes system it uses.
Check me out on BlenderArtists here.