At what age did you start taking pictures on a regular basis?

[Silva Lining]

I got a James Bond Secret Spy Camera when I was about 7 that used 126 film I did use it a few times - I then graduated to a Hanimex 110 camera when I was about 10 - My father got fed up paying for my developing, so taught me how to develop B&W under our stairs and bought me a second-hand Praktica MTL3 with a 50mm Carl Zeiss Jena Tessar 50/2.8 when I was 11 - I still have it and occasional use it. The rest is GAS

 

[Ororaro]

I was 16, had access to a dark room and just never got out of it until the digital age. I still visit my darkroom but I scan a lot...

 

[Keith]

Sadly only a year or so ago and I'm now fifty five. Here's hoping I can string out another thirty or so years ... or I'll feel severely ripped off!

 

[pedro.m.reis]

At 32, after i bought my DSLR.
Then i found this site, and my father's Lynx 14.
Then i got GAS.
The i bought 20+ cameras......

I know.. i know ... sad story....

 

[potomo]

My father is a non pro photografer and his friend the same... so at primary school I started to taking photo with a point and shoot Olympus and with an old Polaroid. when I was 12-13 I started with his new F1 and it was complete love for the photo. Till now I've bought a lot of camera but the F1 is still my LOVE

 

[OurManInTangier]

I was given an old Kodak Instamatic in 1979 - I was six - by a Great Aunt ( there's actually a pic of her in my gallery!) She couldn't work it because of the tiny viewfinder and thought I might like to play with it ( she also gave me a cigarette lighter to play with around that time, halcyon days eh?!)

When it became obvious I enjoyed taking pictures my parents bought me a Praktica something or other that was boxy, clunky and had a screw in 50mm lens. I stuck with that for ten years and then my parents divorced when I was sixteen. In my father's haste to leave he left behind an old Minolta SRT 101 and a slightly newer XD-7(?) with a whole load of prime lenses. It was those two cameras and the 28mm, 35mm, 50mm, 90mm & 135mm lenses primes he left behind that I used throughout college, only when I decided to try and go pro did I buy my first Nikon...an FM2 that I've still got!

I guess I can add myself to the list of people who owe their interest in photography to their fathers!!!

 

[rbsinto]

I was a relative late bloomer, starting in about 1978 when I was 30, right after the birth of our daughter.
What started out as nothing more than snapshot documentation of her growing up, quickly turned into a serious passion, that has consumed me ever since.

 

[planetjoe]

My parents saw my interest in photography early on, for some reason, and got me a Canon T50 with a no-name 50mm lens in 1985 or thereabouts. I loved that camera, and learned how to ISO-shift in order to fool its auto-exposure system. I loved it so much I didn't even realize that the no-name lens had all kinds of diaphragm and focus issues. Heh.

I didn't use it really regularly until 1990 or so, but by '94 I had the first of several AE-1 Programs in my kit. That, I suppose, was the real beginning. Besides, the T50 had been stolen while I was studying abroad in the UK, and I had to move on.

Fast forward to ~20 cameras, assorted parts, and an eBay addiction. Oh, and a pile of unscanned negatives and undeveloped film. Ah, well; life is good. Moral of the story is: give a kid a camera - an RF if you can...


Cheers,
--joe.

 

[MartinP]

In the late sixties and early seventies I used to make three pictures per weekend, with the Box Brownie 620 rollfilm camera that my mother won in a raffle about twenty years previously. That "progressed" to Instamatics (126 and 110), then to 35mm with an Agfa Optima followed by a Praktica MTL3. My first developing was from these cameras using colour slides and the Agfachrome process (not E6).

I sold the MTL3 and lenses to get a Leica 111 something with a Summar, but couldn't get on with the viewfinder so traded it in six months later for a Contax 139. At university I also had a Yashicamat, later traded in for a Mamiya C3. I still use the 139Q (nearly 25 years now) and the C3, although the latter is a bit damaged these days.

Now I have a couple of rf cameras, including recently a Zorki 1 which looks very much like the Leica but is in better condition (still needs adjusting on the shutter speeds though), and that is how I came to be here.

 

[markinlondon]

This is a tricky one. I'll have to quibble and say 15 and 38.

At 15 I got a Zenit E for my birthday and dived into the world of shooting, developing and printing (all on outdated east European materials). I then lost interest sometime in my twenties.

About ten years ago I bought one of those modern computerised cameras to restart my photographic interest. It lasted two weeks before I swapped it for a Pentax K1000 with a 50f2. Shortly after that I drifted into using rangefinders as I realised I only ever used prime lenses of "normal" lengths. I gave the K1000 and 50 to a friend's daughter a few months ago as she is starting a photography A-level.

 

[350D_user]

I was a late starter... 11 years old, going off the serial number of my 20-sumat years old Helios 44-2 M42 lens (the sole remaining bit of my first SLR, a Zenit E).

 

[Thea]

First helped my Dad in his darkroom when I was six, so I started as a technician, and in reverse order, I used to mix chemicals, correct temperatues etc I could produce a reasonable BW print by the time I was ten, helped him out at work (He started out as a fire brigade photographer) from about 12, loading films in his Bronica setting up tripod etc etc, he gave me an old Minolta XG1 then, which would be in around 79, from then on I have taken photos on an obsessive basis, although I have had life get in the way quite often, plus lack of darkroom facilities.
Thea

 

[TheHub]

Long answer: I got my first camera when I was 10? maybe. My mom bought me a Carena 35F - fully automatic camera, but I went around shooting everything with it. The one problem I had was loading the film; I got back a few very light envelopes from the developers so I used an Auto 110 for a while until I could get the hang of loading 35mm properly. Too bad 110 is dead now ...

I didn't pick up photography again until college with a K-1000 (come on - who hasn't used one - honestly?) After college I moved to Japan and got out of it again.

I picked it up again in 2001 with a FujiFilm digital camera. I used digital until March this year. I had been shooting B&W in digital but it's not the same - so I picked up some Acros 100, put it in my K1000 and have been shooting regularly since then.

Short answer: 4 months.

My grandfather was big into photography. When he went on vacation he had a body for B&W, one for color negatives, one for color slides and sometimes a super-8 camera. Unforunately most of his work had to be thrown away after he died. If he's up there watching me, I'm sure he's got an ear-to-ear grin seeing me and my collection. I've been told I'm just like he was when I'm out shooting

 

[Don Gage]

I used a Kodak Instamatic in 4th grade on several field trips and I was hooked. i shot 15 rolls of 8mm movies of bicycling and skateboarding over the next coupleof years. By the 7th grade I was using my dad's Argus C3 and getting pretty good grades in photo class. One of the better competitors had a father who was a Po Photog and used his Canon F-1 SLR, but I still managed to keep up with my vintage RF. I never put all this together until I read this question. That was 30+ years ago, Wow how time flies!
Interesting,
Don.

 

[jbf]

Hmm... I guess I started when I was a little boy when my parents bought me a polaroid camera. I played and played with that camera taking tons of photos... although now i'd look back and realize just how horrible and snap-shotty that they were.

I had always liked playing with cameras but it wasnt until I was given my late Grandfather's Pentax ME with two lenses that I began to become really interested in photography. I was around the age of 16-17 at that time I guess... But even then, It wasnt an instant thing for me. When I first started to take photographs I realized just how bad I was.

For me this really discouraged me. So for about a year or two I stopped taking photographs. However when I was around the age of 19 I bought a digital camera. A canon powershot g6.... I began playing with the camera more and more and started to become more familiar with photography in a technical means.

Eventually I realized that the powershot was only limiting what i wanted to do. It didnt have any of the features i reallyw anted and i was honestly tired of the camera.


So... I first decided i wanted to learn how to take photographs... not just snapshots. I wanted to learn how to make a photographing 'print' in the fine art terms. So, I began to do a lot of reading on the internet (digital-photography-school.com) as well as a lot of reading from old photography books.

It was this combined with constantly viewing photos in magazines, photo essay books (national geographic), and others that I began to see and understand composition, lines, color, movement, and all of the things that can go into making a print. By this time I was so interested that I finally shelled out $1,200 for my first Digital SLR camera. A Nikon D70s. By this time I was 20 years old. I began taking more and more photos with my camera. I loved taking photographs and after a year I realized that I wanted to take a real photography class.

I wanted to do film. So here I am. Three more weeks left of my intro to photography class. I really havnt learned a lot from the class in the sense of technical and teaching knowhow... but I've learned so much just from shooting so many rolls of film and really beginning to see and hone my mind and eyes to previsualize my photos as well as from the other students in my class (almost all of us are seniors or about to be seniors... most of us are film students or visual effects students)


So yeah. Here I am.... within the past three months I have bought two film cameras, a TLR and a FSU rangefinder as well as come into freebies such as a Zeiss Ikon Contaflex Super, etc.

 

[macymills@mac.c]

I implored my parents to buy me a camera for my 9th birthday, and I recall that they got me a Konica P&S of some sort. I used that quite regularly for quite some time, but as I got into those early teen years other interests (ie, boys, lol) prevailed. Stopped photographing for a long while, and it wasn't until 5 years ago (at 29) that I picked up a camera (Nikon F100) again and began taking on a serious interest again.

 

[climbing_vine]

In 1986, when she was 10 and I was 8, my sister was playing tag at recess. She went down one of those playground firemen's poles, but... she forgot to hold on to the pole. She fell flat on her back on the frozen sand (this was January in Chicago), breaking it in a couple of places.

She was paralyzed from the waist down and out of school for the next year, getting home tutoring while undergoing intense physical therapy (within a couple of years she could walk normally, and even turn a cartwheel now and then). Now, my mother was an insomniac, and one of her overnight passions was tuning into the 50,000 watt radio stations that you could pick up from all over the western hemisphere. One night, feeling the stress I suppose, she called into a wee-hours talk show on WBZ in Boston and relayed a bit of the story (I don't really know how it tied in with the show, but that's not so important).

To make a long story short, at this point someone at the station took down her address and started up something of a "collection" for this stranger halfway across the country, and we found ourselves with a lot of mail. Much of it was of the "here are things to help keep you occupied and your mind active while you're stuck in bed" sort, including... two tiny kodak 110 fixed-focus cameras. One for my sister, and one for myself (the nice lady who sent them didn't want the little brother feeling left out).

Well, we carried those everywhere (I did, anyway, and she did too once she was out and about again, hehe). Started out as a "documentary" photography doing "street" on the playground. Took the last few pictures of a good friend of mine, in fact, a few hours before he died in an accident.

Went through many, many 110 cartridges, always eyeing my parents' "grown-up" camera, which was a 35mm fixed-focus Kodak. I didn't realize that it was about the same thing as my 110, just with a bigger negative. It used film in rolls, so it was a real camera. Used that through my teens after the 110 was left on the top of our station wagon and lost during a camping trip, and bought my first Pentax K1000 upon starting college. And the rest is history! I doubt I'll ever bother with another Kodak camera, but they certainly do serve a purpose in being available to even those of very modest means. These days, of course, if you know where to look on the internet all sorts of things are available for not much money, but it was different when your options where what you saw on the shelf in the store, and nothing more--unless you took your chances at the Salvation Army shop, garage sales, or etc.

 

[Mohan]

when I was about 10 I saved up and bought myself a samsung point and shoot, probably put about 25 rolls through it in 8 years, photographing holidays and such. When I was 18 I got myself a digital point and shoot and wanting to try something different I bought a Black and white developing kit and started shooting film through my mums pentax sp500. I found out about rangefinders and bought a fed 1, realising its limits I got a Bessa R. A few months later I got into buying, restoring, and trading cameras. Now I'm looking at a career in the photography business.

 

[Ronald M]

16, in 1958

 

[Nando]

At 11, I became the official family photographer using my father's Canonet. I often think about getting one just for the nostalgia. I shot quite a bit but never seriously. When I entered high school, I lost interest in photography. Now I'm back into it.