peterjoseph

I would like to share the motivating reason of buying my first camera.
In 1965 I was a 14 year old in school and a classmate brought a nice looking camera to school. I requested him to allow me to hold it and get a feel. In short he told me to Get Lost.I decided at that moment to buy my own camera asap.
Six years later I got my first stipend in a company .I used almost the entire stipend and bought a Agfa click 3 camera which used 120 film.I got it devloped and printed from a studio close by.He charged me a bomb.A few more stipends and I bought the All in one Camera book by W D Emanuel ,a developing tank,trays , contact printer,developer ,fixer etc and I could expose the film and make prints at home.
It was fun then and still is today.
It would be nice to hear from you how you started this beautiful hobby or business
Peter

btbg

I went out at night with a flashlight and collected worms and sold them to a local sporting goods store for a penny a worm. Then went down to a second hand store and bought a used Kodak camera for $2 when I was seven. It had a light leak in one corner, but the rest of the photo was OK. Every 500 worms I could buy a roll of film and get it processed.

peterjoseph

That's an interesting way to buy a camera.
Thanks for sharing
Peter

rmalarz Loc: Tempe, Arizona

The movie "Rear Window". However, that wasn't the start of my "doing" photography. It was a year later when I discovered the enlarger and associated processing equipment when cleaning up a storage room. That started the full art of doing photography.
--Bob

dc3legs Loc: Tucson

My first camera is an Olympus C-750 purchased in 2004. I was 55 at the time and had bought a Dell computer the previous year. I had been shown what could be done with a digital camera and a computer in terms of filing and organizing. Photography had always been appealing but the matter of developing film kept me away. Digital made the difference. It won't make you a good photographer but learning will be easier and quicker.

tradio Loc: Oxford, Ohio

I bought in to the hobby around 1980 with the purchase of a 35mm point and shoot. I would shoot and develop one roll a week.
Then I upgrade to a Canon AE1, Canon T-50, Canon A1, Nikon D90, Nikon D800, Nikon D810 and currently using the D850.
Along the way, I have added back up cameras as in the Sony RX and a Leica Q2 mono (awesome). I turn down requests to turn my hobby into a job so all of my camera experiences are pure fun in nature.

Blair Shaw Jr Loc: Dunnellon,Florida

I had purchased several plastic film cameras in the 50's at auctions & flee markets sales but when I was drafted into the war, I was exposed to 35 mm SLR's and had to have one (several) as my interests grew and my payroll enlarged over my tour of duty.

The USO provided us with a free dark room and I jumped-in with both feet and eventually built a dark room of my own 40 years later, I managed to stay in the hobby as money allowed. With the introduction to digital imagery I was able to shed the chemical-world and film processing and have sold and donated nearly all of that historical gear but for a few favored-relics to a local camera dealer.

I have not bought into Mirrorless models yet but the thought has crossed my mind. I have some editing softwares at my disposal but I frankly don't enjoy them much and prefer the Jpeg world. Even my celphone takes a remarkable image and I see that the newer mirrorless models are so good that very little editing is required, anymore and that's my ticket.....slacker-nation.....hahahaha

I appologize for the novel.......thanks for listening.

Jimbo

Mac Loc: Pittsburgh, Philadelphia now Hernando Co. Fl.

My first camera was a Kodak Instamatic that I bought in 1966 or 1967 when I was in the Navy so I could take pictures of the different places we stopped so I could share them with my family.

Strodav Loc: Houston, Tx

My first "real" camera was a Canon AE-1, which I purchased just after the birth of our first child.

PHRubin Loc: Nashville TN USA

Back in 1976 I was engaged and was planning a 6 week cross country drive for our honeymoon. I had always tended to like taking pictures. I wanted something better than my Polaroid. I got a Minolta SRT 100 with a 50 mm lens. I was fortunate in that when I was at the Hoover Dam, I was next to a guy who let me borrow his 17 mm wide angle. It is not distortion, the tower on the upper left is at a 45° angle. This photo is scanned from a 4 X 6 print.

CamB Loc: Juneau, Alaska

In 1970 Minolta sponsored an off road vehicle that raced the BAJA 500. They brought it to Milwaukee on a nation wide promo tour. I was just getting into off road stuff. Went to see the Jeep and ended up buying a Minolta SRT100 with a dinky little flash and two lenses. Before that I had been sneaking my dads camera out until I dropped it down a long concrete stairway. End of that camera.
This cow shot was one of the first pictures I took with that camera on my grandfathers dairy farm.
...Cam

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JohnSwanda Loc: San Francisco

I had some point and shoot cameras as a teenager. When I went to college in the late '60s I started majoring in journalism, and took a photojournalism course, which included darkroom work. The school supplied Yashica D twin lens reflex cameras, but I hated looking down at the viewfinder. My father asked a friend who was into photography and he recommended the Nikkormat as an affordable SLR, so I got one with a 50mm lens, and later added a 28mm and a 200mm. I decided I liked photography better than writing, and by the last two years of college I was working for the campus newspaper, and they had a wonderful equipment cabinet with Nikon Fs with motor drives and all kinds of lenses and flash equipment.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

My first camera at age 9 was a Brownie Hawkeye, which I still have. i actually managed a time exposure of a lunar eclipse on Verichrome Pan 620 as I recall. At 13, I took earnings from my afternoon paper route and bought a Kodak Retina 35. Created a limited darkroom in my bedroom closet, but soon joined the local club who had a real darkroom with a large Omega enlarger. Won a photo contest with two B&Ws of a cat and sold both. Nothing much until VietNam when I had access to a large PIO darkroom in DaNang. Shot a Nikormat, Minolta SRT 101 and a Canon FTQL and shot at least 100 rolls of TriX and Ektachrome and developed and printed them while in country. Fast forward to about 1980 when I bought a Canon AE-1P and then later an F1n. When we remodeled our previous house, I built a real darkroom similar to the one described in the Kodak “how to build a darkroom” book. Later I bought an RB67 system and shot film until maybe 10 years ago when I bought a Canon 7D2. My current house has a good sized darkroom as well and temperature controlled bath for color processing, but since Cibachrome went obsolete I just occasionally shoot and develop B&W film shooting the RB67 ProS and a Canon EOS-1n and of corse mostly digital with a Canon 5D4 and Fuji X-T2.

Copyrat

My Dad's friend who borrowed some money happened to pay back with a Yashica 635 TLR when I was 20. After, Pentax 35, Nikon F100, and Nikon D300, now I have Nikon D750 and Z7 with F mount and Z lenses. Always enjoyed photographing my relatives, landscapes, flowers, insects ... Now it is a nightmare to photograph good looking-innocent kids. Still enjoy reading all of your comments and educated suggestions on photography as I shoot as time permits.

Bobspez Loc: Southern NJ, USA

When I was about 10 I got a Brownie twin reflex camera as a birthday present and took some B&W pictures with it. At 12 I got a Kodak 35mm Pony camera for a birthday present, and started taking color slides. I also had a projector and a screen. I also started using an 8mm movie camera and projector at 14 and took movies until my early 20's and spliced the small reels onto a big reel. I got a polaroid camera in my late teens.
My photography hobbies were confined to single use throw away film cameras in my early thirties, when I bought a Yashica rangefinder camera to take pictures of the kids. Eventually I bought my first digital camera, then another, then another, until I switched to DSLR's when I retired.