When did you first fall in love with photography?

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sirius

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For me, it was when I read the Family of Man that I first fell in love with photography. I still aspire to make those kind of images.

How about you: was it a book or a person? What started this passion for you?
 
A friend had borrowed a Pentax Spotmatic so he could make photos of people and do charcoal portraits. I liked the black and white photos better than the drawings he made. I bought an SLR and a few rolls of Tri-X and, before long, I had a darkroom. It also helped that I saw photos by Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Walker Evans that totally blew me away.
 
For a short period of time, my parents subscribed to Life en español (the Spanish version of Life Magazine). I saw a lot of photographs in its pages... even tried to keep a few issues, but my mother thought they were not valuable and threw them away.

Those B&W images just reeled me in bad...
 
During a short vacation in Montevideo in January 1961, my father asked me to "breathe, don´t move and just push the button" of his Wirgin Presto, a folding 6x9 he had.

I asked why, and he said "Ok, I´ll tell you later". The short explanation he gave me lead to more questions from my side, and one day he said, Ok, have this book. Read it and ask me whatever you don´t understand.

The book title was " How to take good pictures" written by Marcel Valotaire with the foreword by Berenice Abbott. Since then, I got involved with photography.

Dad is gone now, but I still keep the book.

Ernesto
 
I think it was when I was a kid and my close friend pulled out his dad's TLR. Don't remember what make it was. It intrigued me to no end. However, was pretty poor then so it would be a while before I had anything to play with: a used Kodak Retina, I believe. It didn't take long for me to realize that photography can be an expensive hobby.
 
1966. First trip to Berlin as a 9 year old. Mum & Dad bought me a Kodak Brownie specially for the trip. It took nice photo's, I still have the prints.

I still have the camera and I recently bought some new 127 fillum, I just need the right occasion to put the two together again.
 
2005. I sat down and figured out how to manually operate my Sony W1 digital point and shoot.

That led to me using the Argus c-4 I bought for $1.65 on ebay in 1998 as well as the Yashica Electro-35 cameras I had bought for $3 at Goodwill in 2000.

Here I am today with over 100 freakin cameras sitting around my house, developing and printing film. Steep learning curve, steeper addiction pitall.
 
I've loved it since I was a kid and was given a small Kodak -- you snapped a film cartridge in, looked through the square plastic viewfinder, and squeezed down on the plastic shutter release. Then you brought the film in and got these these cool square pictures. I used it on our travels. We still look at the snaps.

Then in 1978, I took a class as a high school freshman and developed my first films (Tri-X) and printed them. I was totally hooked. I developed my most recent Tri-X this morning. One of the rolls is 6x6, so I'm still working the square. Loyal, I guess.
 
I think it was when I was about 6 years old. I think only a handful of the photos I took as a child survive. The very first photo I ever took (taken when I was 4 years-old) survives; my dad has it.

It was really a long discovery; photography, like music, in Mexico, was very much an upper-middle class realm, when I was growing up; so it was hardly ever pursued.

I have consistently engaged in photography since 2002, on my birthday. I was admiring my then-girlfriend, and decided to start taking pictures. Have hardly stopped since then.
 
It was around 2005 or so. I had a nagging feeling to unearth my mother's Canon A35f "Nighter". I dug it out, popped batteries into it, and the meter didn't go anywhere. I put it away for a few weeks, but the nagging continued. I eventually made my way here, and posted my first thread on how to revive the old "Nighter". Some kind Rff'er helped me out, and all it took was a swab of vinegar on the contacts and she lived again!

I suspect the reason for the nagging was due to the fact that the "Nighter" was the first camera I learned to use. It was my mother's and it was older than me. I held onto it for years not knowing why. That lead me to my love of rangefinders and photography in general.

The "nighter" doesn't get used too much these days, but is sure is pretty:
385825202_05e6b9d930.jpg
 
My interest started as a teenager in high school. You see, I had moved around a lot as a child. So, unlike most of my fellow high school students who had literally grown up together, I was "the new kid." But then, I was used to that and as a result I developed some minimal observational skills. That translated well in one of my elective courses, Beginning Photography. I ended up being the school photographer and yearbook photographer. Worked out pretty well because since I was the new kid I wasn't already part of any single clique and, instead, became members of most of them. It's fun to go back and look at my yearbook and see all the pictures that I took. I can still remember taking each one of them. Of course, I'm a bit more critical today of the quality of the images.

Boy, I sure do miss having ready access to a darkroom and as much time as I wanted to work in it. My darkroom situation was unique because since I was the yearbook photographer, I had my own private darkroom and my own key to it. So, I could come and go on campus at any time day or night and work in the darkroom. Ah, to have such freedom again...

I also remember how, upon graduating from college my dad offered to buy me a camera as a graduation present. But I needed a suit for my new job and so asked for that instead. I still regret that decision.

-Randy
 
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1968 or so. My father worked part-time as a private investigator for a major Saint Louis - based brewery, investigating employee theft from delivery trucks. He had a camera, high-speed film, and a Colt 'Detective Special' with a 2-inch snub-nose barrel.

He used to come home late at night and go into the basement, which he had converted to a darkroom. He processed his film and made 8x10 prints, and he'd let me watch him from the basement steps. The smells, watching the image appear in the trays, it was all magical.

On a business trip to Chicago, he bought me a Diana toy camera and let me shoot two rolls of film through it. We processed the film together and made contact prints. I wish I still had them - they were of the U-505 at the Museum of Science and Industry.

That was the start of a life-long love of photography.
 
2004 for me. I was getting married and starting law school the next year and I could not afford my current extra curricular activities, modifying and legally racing cars (VW's). So, I bought a Zenit ET for about $20 including shipping. Shortly thereafter, I got a Zorki 4k. I've been using, buying, selling and trading cameras since then.
 
When I went on summer camp with my father's Nikon FM, 50mm f/1.2 and 2 rolls of BW film, almost three years ago. Never having used an SLR or manual camera, most photos were good. Recently I started using it again, because I bought a D200, but that can't touch the pure shooting like I did from the first day.

My father bougth the camera in the early 80's for PJ work and sometimes a family photo. Last year I found a box with negatives, the black and white negatives scanned just like the photos I developed the day before.

Some great photos of my brother & me from more than ten years ago. Too bad most digital files will have been lost when the children of these days have grown up.

http://www.pbase.com/teus/image/71031522
 
Teus said:
Too bad most digital files will have been lost when the children of these days have grown up.
Click to expand...

Of course, because electrons vanish. Film lasts forever. Ask anyone whose house floated away in Katrina, along with their film.

Can we leave this never-ending film vs digital political crap out, please?
 
I never fell in love. It just happened to pass my way somehow and I stuck with it. More a marriage of convenience. I can't paint. I'm a lousy draw artist. I don't play an instrument, make music, write, dance or sculpt, and can't or don't do any other artistic pursuit.
 
I came by mine honestly, as the expression goes. My Dad was a serious photograher in the forties and fifties, had work published in National Geographic, amounst other places. So I grew up around cameras and "helping" my father in the darkroom.
I was inspired by his work, and by seeing other's photography.
The first camera that I used was an Ansco (which I still have) that belonged to my mother, although she was never that interested in taking pictures, so she gave it to my when I was about 10-12 years old. It took 616 size film. Sadly, I don't know what happened to the film I shot back then. It is all gone! My Mom tended to purge thoughly, to make up for Dad's tendency to keep everything, so I quess it went one of those times.
Keith
 
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