How did you guys get started...

[jky]

... in photography... and more specifically in the genre that you enjoy the most.
Just wondering.

I actually got into it by default as my father had an F3hp that he didn't know how to operate. It was my job to figure the thing out and then teach him. Eventually, it was just too much beyond the point & click that he's used to so he told me to keep it instead. Thereafter, I spent hours upon hours @ the library or Chapter's (similar to Barnes & Nobles and Borders) reading about apertures, shutter speeds, composition, metering, etc...
Started in landscape & really enjoyed that, but not the early mornings scouting for a good vantage point a couple hours away in the Rockies. This eventually became too time consuming...
I then discovered HCB - by accident - as I was researching a camera called a "leica" that another local hobbyist spoke of so highly. From there I discovered Erwitt, Frank, Winogrand, Moriyama, Davidson, Friedlander .... and fell in love with the images in front of me...
Hooked!

What about you guys?

 

[pesphoto]

My dad got into photography when I was around 12 years old and I watched him build a darkroom in our basement. I kind of took over th edarkroom and so he signed me up for lessons with a local photog and lent me his K1000(which I still have). Now 42 years old I am still addicted and am building my own darkroom in my own basement.

 

[dee]

My Dad was taking pictures from early on - and I was captivated by '' magic pictures on the wall '' a Brownie 127 clinched it ! An Adox Golf 1a , mid 60s confirmed it .
I wanted to play with dad's Praktina FX , but he was not approachable .... I did pick it up and hold it sometimes though ... I think that it was the profile / shape model for the Kievs I dee'scovered much later !

 

[Ronald_H]

Got a decent SLR when I saw how much better my colleague's museum and travel pics looked than mine. We travelled throught the UK together in 1998, testing satnav systems. We visited Cambridge, Brighton and the RAF museum in Hendon. I only had a 640x480 digital and a fixed focus 35mm camera back then...

That first SLR served me well when I started shooting a rapidly becoming famous rock band. But to do that you need fast lenses. And my AF was rather slow... well that's how it started.

Said band has used my pics for years and I did a fair bit of concert shooting for other bands as well. Then I started shooting the girls I met at concerts, thus starting my portrait portfolio. Then I got a bit bored with digital and bought a Nikon FM. Analog is cheap, so I now have a closet full of classic manual cameras, a Canonet, a Leica M2, a Yashica Mat 124. I also started developing my own B/W.

And the story continues...

 

[FrankS]

I found my father's old camera (Kodak Rettinette) in a closet and started using it while in second year of university. Read library books on photography and joined my university's darkroom club.

Hey, that was over 30 years ago!

 

[Al Kaplan]

There was a darkroom in my grandmother's basement with my dad's long unused 5x7 Elwood enlarger which also had a 75mm lens in a recessed board, while the attic contained his Folmer Schwing 6.5 X 8.5 view camera plus a 5x7 reducing back. In my senior year in high school an older friend with a Leica III-f got me interested in doing some photography. My dad encouraged me.

 

[pesphoto]

hmmm. i sense a theme developing.......

 

[kuvvy]

Bought my first camera, a Kodak Instamatic, with my first weeks wages. Mum and Dad weren't too pleased. That was back in 1973 and I've owned a camera (to be honest more than one) ever since. My dad told me that during the war, he was offered a Leica by a German soldier. He was asking about £10 and at that time it was a chunk of money. Anyway, my Dad didn't take up the offer. Shame, as I still don't own a Leica🙁

 

[Don Parsons]

I was going to the Oshkosh Fly-In right after my birthday. I asked for a camera for my birthday present and received an Instamtic 110. I usned that until starting High School when I found my dad's old Petri Rangefinder. I soon acquired a Pentax K1000 asnd started my journey.

 

[bolohead]

I was 14 and going on a 2 week backpack trip. Dad gave me his old Canon SLR with a bunch of rolls of black and white. Gave me a crash course on exposure. I still have the negs.

 

[back alley]

i started to read photo mags, got interested in gear and images simultaneously and bought my first 'good' camera - an oly 35rc- all around 1972.

 

[russianRF]

I have always sort of been interested in photography; but never really took to it. About ten years ago, I really got into Photoshop, mostly because I needed to work with professional web site designs. So, in many ways, I was brought to Photoshop by the dot com bubble. A few years after that, I took some classes in Photoshop, to be more professionally compotent with the application.

A couple of years ago, tired of merely 'rescuing' cell phone photos in Photoshop, I got a DSLR - a Canon Rebel XT (still have/use it). It went on from there, longer zooms, better lenses. I was captivated with having real, (semi-)professional content to work with in Photoshop.

I read all sorts of pointless things, late into the night, on occasion. I read up on photography, and soon came to read about the world of rangefinder cameras. Looking for a decent Russian Hasselblad copy, I eventually spied a Fed5 at KievUSA.com. Having heard about the superior optics, and generally different 'vibe' of rangefinders, I decided to give it a try. It sat around for a few months, until I took a class in (mostly film SLR-based) photography. Then I learned about HCR, Winnogrand, and other famous street photographers.

That brought me to where I am today. I still often use my DSLR setup for studio work, and I occasionally use a film SLR for things. But I'm hooked on my rangefinder for street photography work. And I seem to enjoy street photography more than studio work, I find it more artistically fullfilling, so I spend most of my time behind the lens being behind an FSU rangefinder. Hopefully, one day I can add Leica to my collection (used to want to REPLACE with Leica, but I love love love my Industar lens).

I still do spend a lot of time in Photoshop...

 

[Ducky]

My father shot a 4x5 speed graflic(?) and tried to interest me but I cared less. I probably hurt his feelings too. I later got a job which required me to take pictures of building exteriors with a K1000 for insurance purposes. It was just a job until I spotted something broken and rusted and took a pix. I accidently underexposed it and the contrast was wonderful.
Now it still shoot broken and rusted things, have too many cameras, too many negatives, a few pix on a few walls here and there and chemicals in the bathroom.
PS: I am a lousy photographer but the process fascinates me.

 

[capitalK]

My dad was a police investigator and took pictures of crime scenes, dead bodies etc. My mother pointed out to me why my dad enjoyed doing landscapes so much... because it was basically the opposite of shooting dead bodies. He was a TLR shooter, very slow but around the time I came around in the mid-70's he switched to 35mm SLR gear full-time and hung up the TLR's.

In the early 90's when he bought a Nikon F4s he gave me his Rollei SLR. I shot B&W with it because I could develop it for free at school. When I went off to college I gave up on photography because I just didn't have the money. A few years ago when my wife got pregnant I bought a DSLR and it all came back to me, everything he taught me.

I organized his slides recently to give back to him and noticed that all the medium format slides ended a few months before I was born (thanks to the date being printed on them). Made me kind of sad that he gave up probably to spend more time with me or to sell his camera for stuff I needed.

I wanted to get back to film because digital just wasn't doing for me. As luck would have it I found a Yashica MG-1 at a local thrift store. I had read about rangefinders but never used one. It was a slippery slope after that.

Getting back to the darkroom after such a long time was a big thrill for me. I'm sorry I ever gave it up.

 

[DougFord]

About 8 years ago I decided that I wanted to ‘learn’ photography.
I always had a passing interest in photography but whenever I tried to take a picture with an slr or P&S camera I wasn’t really happy with the results and reasoned that I would need to learn how to control all of the photographic parameters if I expected different results.
So I bought a leica m6 off of eBay in the summer of 01 and some B&W film along with the necessary developing gear and started to teach myself the fundamentals of photography. It was at this time that I also became aware of specific ‘famous’ photographers, by name, whose work I had admired.
Ironically, I no longer have the m6 and prefer to use P&S film cameras now.

 

[Ronald_H]

In a word: Women.

Refreshingly honest 😛

Quote from a colleague: "Looking at your site, it's very hard to hide your sexual preference'.

 

[calexg]

Throughout my life, I've gone from film to digital and from digital to film. Then I bought a Leica. I'm never going back to digital.

 

[SolaresLarrave]

I grew up looking at old copies of Life magazin (in Spanish), and got really interested in learning photography at 14. However, I had to drop it all because of school and lack of my own money. It wasn't until I finished grad school and got a teaching, stable job that I decided to go back to cameras and photography with SLRs.

The problem is that I got quickly bored. Then, someone recommended me to take a look at rangefinder cameras... and that was the end of it.

 

[VictorM.]

I'm not sure. Nobody in my family was interested in photography.

 

[FrankS]

How about the milkman? 😉