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

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

  • 0-4

    Votes: 4 0.8%

  • 5-9

    Votes: 40 8.3%

  • 10-14

    Votes: 134 27.9%

  • 15-19

    Votes: 123 25.6%

  • 20-24

    Votes: 80 16.6%

  • 25-29

    Votes: 45 9.4%

  • 30-34

    Votes: 21 4.4%

  • 35039

    Votes: 12 2.5%

  • 40-44

    Votes: 10 2.1%

  • 45-49

    Votes: 8 1.7%

  • 50-54

    Votes: 3 0.6%

  • 55+

    Votes: 1 0.2%
  • Total voters
    481
Seriously at 11. My sister's boyfriend was a photographer and he let me snap a few rolls with a nikon F witha 35mm lens. Before that I got comments about nice photos but those first rolls got the juices flowing. I talked my dad out of his Argus C3 Matchmatic and my aunts CircaFlex TLR.

I have been blessed tohave put a roll through almost every type ofcamera the last 35 years and I ain't stopping now.


 
My father has never had any interest in anything other than snapshot photography, but his father was a very keen amateur. I never knew either grandfather, as both were killed during WW2 before I was born. George Hicks died when HMS Gloucester was sunk off Crete, Harry Reynolds on the Russia convoys.

So when I decided that the Ilford Sporti 4 I'd had since I was 11 was not enough, my father (who, like his father, was in the Navy) bought me a two-year-old Pentax SV on the express condition that I learned to process and print my own pictures: he also bought me an enlarger, trays, etc. That was when he was posted to Bermuda in '66 and I was 16. And he found 4x 200 foot cans of 1963-dated FP3 swilling around in Stores. When I started I didn't even know which side was the emulsion side (the film was wound emulsion out).

Still using Ilford, though...

Cheers,

Roger
 
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I had a camera about 9 or ten 10 but I shot regularly a bit later.

I began professionally at 18 years old as a cub photographer for a small daily newspaper. A Speed Graphic and a Crown Graphic. Lasted about a year.

Then I moved up to a tiny weekly newspaper. Lasted 6 months.

Downhill ever since I'm afraid.
 
Bought my first Nikkormat at 18 for my first student´s loan, after having envied several friend´s Spotmatics and Fs for a couple of years (they were better off and older than me). Had to sell it, got a Minolta SRT 100b a couple of years later. Since then...
 
I think I first started taking pictures when I was about six (c. 1973), when an aunt gave me her old Kodak Dual-flex III TLR. (Which never took a sharp picture in my hands!).

I became interested in old cameras around the same time; my first fascination was with TLR's and box-Brownies with the reflex finders...

I soon became fascinated with folding cameras, and got a couple of those too.

At that time, "ancient" formats such as 116 and 616 were still available (at the local drugstore!), as well as 620 and 828... so I shot with all of those, until the supply dried-up.

I took some fairly decent pics with a #2 Box-Brownie using 116 film, as well as a Jiffy Six-Sixteen folder(my first focusable camera).


When I got to high-school, my dad let me use his Nikon S on occasion, and I began to try taking more "skilled" pictures.

Senior year of high-school, I acquired a Kodak Retina IIIc outfit from a friend's father; this was my first "real" camera; I shot lots of Kodachrome with that camera.

After college, I stopped taking pictures for a while - like, 10 years or so...

I've really gotten back into photography about five years ago, when I "stole" a Minolta XG-1 outfit at a rummage sale for $50 (camera, power-winder, and about 5 lenses): my first "modern" camera !

Then, I made friends with a real camera-nut (he fancies East-German stuff) and very good photographer... he talked me into getting an Exakta, and thus my most recent flirtation with photogrpahy has begun, here in the twilight of film...


It would seem that my picture-taking has been "Driven" by what gear I've run across, and my deisre to use it.

My latest passions are thread-mount Leicae, and large-format.


Still trying to conquer the basics, such as "composition" and "exposure"...


Luddite Frank
 
I had a couple of box cameras as a little kid. The first one took 127 film but when I was about 10 I got one that took 8 pix on 620 fil and had a built in flash that took (I think) M-2bulbs. I got a 35mm Ansco camera at 13. By the time I was 18 I had a Canon II-S and a couple of lenses. I was HOOKED.

Years earlier my dad had made a darkroom in my grandmother's house with a 5X7 Elwood enlarger and in the attic was an ancient Folmer-Schwing 6 1/2 X 8 1/2 view camera with a 5X7 reducing back, so I was into large format before I was 20.
 
I only started serious photography when I turned 29 (that`s when I founded my business)

I wasted 9 years before that just collecting and selling Leica`s and Rollei`s and never using them, back then they were all China Cabinet Princesses

It`s much much more fun now shooting especially what I shoot, (Retro PinUps) but I do regret that I didn`t start doing it since High School, I didn`t get into cameras until I joined the Army and went to Germany (at age 20 I started collecting) - it`s been downhill from then on 😉

Tom
 
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Until I was in college, the only photos I had ever taken were the family trip snapshot kind. With disposable cameras no less! Then I had to take photography for my art degree. The first time through, I failed. The second time though, something clicked.

Now I have many cameras from the fifties, sixties, and earlier; and they all work. I know what kind of films I like and why, and I know a great deal about photography technique and history.

Oh, and I passed Photo 101 the second time around, as well as intermediate, advanced, color, and experimental. But, truth be told, those were just excuses to get more cameras and take more pictures.
 
I started with the family Zeiss Ikon folding camera at age nine and became the official family photographer for vacations, events, and was even allowed to shoot non-official pictures.

Two years later my parents bought me a Honeywell Pentax H1A (?) SLR. I shot pictures with that up until college. Somewhere in Junior High School I purchased a Yankee Developing Kit and processed my first roll of Tri-X and made a contact sheet. Any further darkroom work had to wait until college.

And I just kept shooting and doing things until I woke up one day in my early 20's and realized I could make money at it. Decades later I am still at it...
 
Soon after I was born, we moved to a new house and by dad's light table was in my bedroom, the darkroom next room over. Since he was doing professional photography and just starting a printing business it was hectic days (not too noticed by me at the time). One of the early "toys" we played with as kids was the lens from the 5x7 Linhof. We loved to trigger the shutter….

Other early novelties were box cameras, a German folding camera (not to be named) that always ate the film, Mamiya Super Press, Pentax, and so on…. We used an Agfa with a "wide angle lens" and a Pentax 35mm for all family vacations, and we all shot photos from when ever we could hold the camera.

In those early days it was clear that German film gave better results on the Agfa and Japanese films seemed to work better with lenses from that part of the world.

Interesting thread….
CLH
 
Seriously at 15 with a Dacora Digna, shortly followed by a Dacora Dignette, a forunner to the Ilford Sportsman. This was soon traded for a used Contaflex I with a 2.8 Tessar which I still have. The magic of seeing images emerge from the developer kept me hooked.
 
I started off with an Olympus 35RD that I think I got as a christmas present when I was 15, just before I went to Germany as an exchange student. I shot about a roll a week of Ektachrome 64 or something while I was there and have been hooked ever since. Took the RD with me to college and used it there for a couple years; got my first SLR at the same time and it's been shooting & GAS since then as my bank account allows.
 
I was given this god awful camera at age 12. It was an english camera that wasn't in focus at any distance. It's a wonder I perservered at all! Luckily I then acquired a decent 620 Vigilant (Kodak) that restored my belief that photography was a pursuit that was worth the effort! 🙂. Shut in the pantry and dipping the film in soup dishes. Parents calling out the minutes.
Next was a Retina 1A. Then I was hooked!

Murray
 
At about age 11 I bought the first camera of my own - an Instamatic. It was a fairly basic model, as that's all that pocketmoney could stretch to, and looking at the models for sale on ebay, I think it was a 25. For a couple of years before that I'd been handed various family folders and been shown how to use them - odd thing, Medium Format was my first film, now it's my latest one.
 
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i started 12 years ago. initially with a deceased estate canon ae-1 then got introduced to rangefinder format with my mother-in-laws voigtlander vito B. Also GIVEN a plaubel makina 67. never looked back since. have been taking pictures with rangefinders in different formats.
 
I checked "10-14", which seems to be the most popular choice, mainly because I can't remember much any further back than that. My photography over the years has been on and off so many times, however, that I wish there had been an option for "all of the above".
 
My first camera I ever used was my father's Nikkormat when I went on a school trip to Atlanta at the age of about 17. This was in 1998 when fully automatic cameras and even digital cameras were becoming quite popular. My father taught me how to read the little needle in the viewfinder, and set manual exposures. I'm very grateful I started learning this way. Years later I became more serious and bought my first RF on Ebay, a Yashica Electro GSN. Later my father saw me with the camera and commented.... "that was the first camera I ever bought." It's funny how these things happen.
 
Having both my parents as photographers I do not remember not having a camera.The first camera I was conscious of was a 35mm Retina Folder. When I was 4. I would go to the hospital with my mother where she did volunteer work taking pictures for research on Polio patients and their rehabilitation. With my dad I got yo go all over Cuba to all sorts of assignments.
 
I first started taking pictures seriously around age 11. My dad (in accordance with the theme) gave me a Canonet QL17 and I shot as much as I could scrape together the money for film.
 
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