When did you first fall in love with photography?

[rpsawin]

At age 11 looking thru my dad's Playboy magazines...lol My first camera was a mint green plastic Kodak camera and my parents bought me a film development kit for my 12th birthday. Since that time I have been off and on with photography. I have been very serious about it for the last 7 years and it has become my passion.

And I still sneek a peek at Playboy now & then....you know, to make sure the quality hasn't slipped.

Bob

 

[israel_alanis]

It is interesting how each of us fell in love with photography.

In my case my mother and father throughout theirs life have used cameras, my grandfather was photoengraver and to lithography for the biggest selling newspapers in Mexico, an uncle was a professional photographer and his grandfather and father were, so all my uncles and aunts have a photographer inside them.

I grew up watching my father use the Robot Royal III, and he grew up watching my grandfather use the Robot, when I enter to highschool could have a camera, so my love of photography was around 1992. After that I bought nikon and canon.

On the Robot Royal III, it broke a string of mechanism and was so from 1986 to 2008, in 2008 I contact the Robot factory, sent the camera to the factory and returned to me as new.

Now Photography is my best friend.

Regards.

 

[bwcolor]

I fell in love with photography when my father projected Argus C3 generated Kodachrome images of our family vacation. I was probably eight years old.

 

[Delap]

My mom shot me over the years with a TLR (Semflex), and I got used to look in this strange viewfinder. At 8 or 9, I got an Instamatic camera, and went out trying to do "wildlife photography", shooting finches in my garden. The results were poor :-D and I forgot a little about photography. I tried to obtain a Mamiya SLR that was on sale at the nearby shop at 13, but did not succeed.
I started again at 19, my first trips to foreign countries with the Rollei 35 I bought for my mom on Mother's day: too complex for her, I knew that !.
And then came Minoltas SRT and X700, and later the first of a long serie of EOS (from 100 to 5DII) and eventually, I became a ... pro photographer.

 

[barnwulf]

My first camera

My first camera

When I was 5 or 6 years old my family took a lot of pictures with a Kodak 620 box camera. I took a few picture with it and thought it was fun. I didn't do any more until I was a freshman in college, 1957, when I took a trip and came home with a bunch of photographs from a point and shoot camera. My parents thought that I should have a better camera and bought me a 35mm Zeiss Contina II. It didn't have a rangefinder but it had a light meter. It had a 45mm lens. Around 1959 some friends of my parents went to New York and brought me a book/magazine called, Contemporary Photography, which was an issue on abstract photography. I remenber there some pictures by Edward Steichen, Paul Caponigro, Arron Siskind and others. It was magic to me. I fell off the cliff crazy about photography and started photographing seriously at that point. I spent many hours looking at that small book. I think I still have it someplace. I still love photographing to this day. - jim

Attached photo of a Zeiss Contina II.

 

[CK Dexter Haven]

I was fascinated by cameras as a kid. I liked to play with my grandmother's Polaroid. I had one of those toy miniature cameras from the back of a comic book. My grandfather took me out looking for film for it — never found any in the right size.... I found out later that my grandfather was a pretty good photographer himself.

Later, around 1981 or 82, just after my parents divorced, i was with my father, visiting his new girlfriend. She was a bit 'arty,' having been to Paris and all. She had American Photographer magazines, and i looked at them for a while. I remember very distinctly the Richard Avedon issue featuring the Nastassja Kinski with Serpent photograph. That was it, and i started going to public libraries to see photography books. I discovered Penn and he and Avedon have been my heroes since.

 

[JayGannon]

Always been absolutly facinated by photography.
my first serious camera was given to me at 12, it was a Canon F1 with a 50mm 1.2, my fathers which was in the attic at that stage, I broke the lens mount after about 6 months somehow and being a 12 year old didn't want to tell my parents and figured that wood glue would stick it back together! Result? Death of an F1 and lovely lens. Been infatuated ever since. And still don't take care of my equipment

 

[surfer dude]

Well, I just happen to think this is the nicest, most personal thread I've read on RFF!

My own journey bagan quite early in life, when Mum and Dad bought my brother and I Brownies one Christmas. That was OK, and I remember thinking how clever newspaper photographers must have been to take so many pictures of the same thing to stick one in each of the papers they sold!

But it wasn't until 1969 or 1970 that two things converged to make me become lifelong seduced by photography. The first was seeing "Blow Up" and sensing that you could live like this, running around taking photos, meeting pretty girls and being involved in a glamorous, mysterious life. The second was that my best friend got a decent camera, a Kowa rangefinder, and set up a darkroom. He said the shop he'd bought the Kowa from had a second one so I bought that and we spent many nights in the darkroom developing and enlarging. The magic of the darkroom and the satisfaction of developing your own film, then enlarging it onto paper!

When I finished high school, Mum bought me a Canon TLb and I have never looked back. Cameras have come and gone, but I have always, since then, looked at the world with a photographer's eye. Funnily enough, now I am back to a couple of rangefinders as my main cameras, just like when I was first smitten! And I still love "Blow Up"!