What got you into "photography"?

Loved photography since I was a kid, I was always helping take pictures on trips and all that. Uncle told me that I was good at it, when I was like 11 and we were all in yosemite.

Always wanted a camera, couldn't get one. Dad gave me one right before I gradded from Berkeley and I was walking around campus taking pictures. I decided after a while that the point and shoot was limiting me, so I bought a DSLR.

:D
 
I've always taken photos but when I was a kid I was limited by the films my parents would buy. In 2002 we got our first digital camera, a Kodak Easyshare and that was almost exclusively used by me until it broke. We still have it somewhere in all of its 2 megapixel glory and one of the photos got on the BBC nature website, a pigeon taken through a pair of binoculars. Anyway that was replaced with a cheap compact which has worked for years, again with me usually in control of it.

In 2008 I decided that I wanted to take the next step and got a D40 for Christmas. The first time I used it was at the MPH show 2008 as a 'test' of the camera to make sure it was fine (this is a cheap trick we still pull to get to play with Christmas presents in mid-November). I was hooked.

A few months later I bought a used 55-200mm VR lens to go with the kit lens (hard to believe I've had that lens for nearly 3 years) and then in 2009 they were joined by a 35mm prime. By now I was still considering myself to be a point and shoot amateur, but in 2010 I got talking with someone at work who had bought a 500D and we started taking things more seriously. I read up on the technical aspects so I could use manual instead of shutter-priority and developed my skills. In late 2010 I got a photo published in a calendar and decided it was time to replace the D40. The process took a couple of months but eventually I had my hands on the D7000.

Cut to now and due to it being winter and the trouble I've had with the S3 I haven't used the camera anywhere near as much as I want to, but hopefully come spring I will be back out there.

Just a side note, reading Epp_b's post makes me realise how far he's come in the last few years. I had been thinking that you started with a D40 in 2008 but started to question that when I look at your current photos, there really are some stunners. :)

Tl;dr edition: Bought a D40 in 2008, went from there.
 
dad got sick of buying a point and shoot every 2nd year or so when they died and just decided to get a 400d w/ 17-85 IS USM thinking he wouldnt have to buy another one for me any time soon. it was a good decision...

but...

he didnt factor in that i'd get hooked and would buy a new camera every 2nd year anyway (i use a 7d now and i used the 400d for 2 years but its still 100% working) as well as the thousands i'd also spend on accessories (tripod, monopod, flash, mem etc) and lenses....

OR perhaps this was his master plan as payback for me going through cameras at his expense when i was young :p
 
Just a side note, reading Epp_b's post makes me realise how far he's come in the last few years. I had been thinking that you started with a D40 in 2008 but started to question that when I look at your current photos, there really are some stunners
Wow, thanks :blush:
 
Started off with a Nikon film camera which then graduated to a Nikon PnS digital my dad had. Grew tired of the IQ and fact that because I go to events a lot, I was missing a lot when I had to wait for the built-in flash to cycle and the fact that I didn't have anything remotely like a tele. And most photos with the in-built flash are horrible anyway.

Cousin was into photography and he gave me his Oly E-500. It's been two years now and I'm now on the E-620 and still looking for lenses to buy. :D
 
It might sound cheesy but here is my story,

It started with my granma passing away. I was around 16 and my family did not have any sort of camera (film or digital) though we had our pics taken in a studio and on other ocassions such as family gatherings and at marriages. We only had old photographs of my granny and I wanted to have some pics of my family in their natural habitat ;)

Thats when I started saving up money and started researching available options. I came across this Kodak CX 6200 and finally after 3-4 months got one.

As a typical geek, I took to that and thats how I got into photography. Now, I only have a Canon A720IS but am planning on getting a T2i in the near future.
 
I don't even know. Originally when we were likkle kidz my bruvva wanted to learn about photography and our parents got each of us little compact 35mm cameras (yeeeeah baby, I started on film!)... anyways that didn't go far as he realized he's not the least bit creative (lol). Whatever. Several years later we get our first digital camera (ooh, wow, a digital camera, fanceh! A whole two megapixels, amazing!). For some reason I always ended up being the one with the camera, which, to be honest, was sometimes annoying because it's like "Well why don't you take the camera for a change?" "What? Me? I, uhh, ooh take a picture of that." And then we finally actually got a good camera several years later, instead of that piece of crap kodak whose photos sort of looked like oil on canvas at 100%, no detail at all. Err, like I was saying, we finally get a nicer camera which I actually took interest in and slowly I got more and more into it.
 
I took a pretty amazing shot with a really crappy point and shoot. Been hooked ever since I had that film developed..figured if I could get some really neat pictures with a $30 film camera, it would be fun to play around with a decent slr.
 
Today: still obsessed, keep thinking I'm getting worse and better at the same time. Curse you, Dunning-Kruger.

I have hit this phase as well, I hate when you start out in the dSLR hobby and everything is fun, new and exciting and then with experience and practice you start to learn what you can't do yet and become less and less satisfied with the pics you shoot because your critical eye is a lot more knowledgable. Never mind your photos are actually better and better with time, even if they impress you less.

I'm planning to register for more professional photography workshops, focusing on studio lighting and maybe some outdoor seminars.
 
have hit this phase as well, I hate when you start out in the dSLR hobby and everything is fun, new and exciting and then with experience and practice you start to learn what you can't do yet and become less and less satisfied with the pics you shoot because your critical eye is a lot more knowledgable. Never mind your photos are actually better and better with time, even if they impress you less.
How did you break into my brain?
 
It all started in high school, where the yearbook class had a nice DSLR (Nikon, though I don't remember the type) ...I was one of the only people who could snap decent shots using manual mode for yearbook and newspaper and I never even took any of those classes.
Useless, the lot of those dummies XD. I'm glad I got extra credit in my other classes for it though.

After I graduated though I missed the camera bunches and so I went off and bought an $800 one. It was probably not a great idea considering my budget...so I'm forcing myself to get better so I can hopefully pay off the debt! :lol:
 
Honestly not sure

I recall getting a Vivitar 35mm compact as a present one time. It was pretty basic but it had a bulb mode (I cant be sure whether it was vivitar actually). I cant imagine I ever did anything good with it, I do remember trying bulb mode out by wizzing some to cars infront of it, of course the results were pretty cack because I hadnt the first clue about what I was doing.

A few years later when I had my own money to spend, I bought a Canon SD400 (IXUS 50) whilst in NYC. At the time I was obsessed with the 1cm macro mode, but eventually got round to being obsessed with long exposures, jaunty angles for my framing and even later on I began to learn how to trick the camera into getting roughly the shutter speeds I wanted so I could do some panning shots. Then I found options like night mode which uses flash, but still keeps the shutter open a bit longer... that gives you some pretty cool effects on a night out, with subjects frozen nicely, but background lights are blurred and smeared across the frame (its exactly how you remember the night when you're drunk!!) and then started doing things like covering the flash with tissue paper to diffuse it etc etc.... it was then that I thought I've really outgrown this thing and bought an SLR, a EOS 400D.

Ive out grown that to some extent now as well, the AF system really cannot cope with some of the shots I want to take, especially with fast glass. Its ISO performance isnt that good any more, I have to use 1600 to get the shots I want, and even then, with F2.8 glass im struggling for good shutter speeds. Continuous drive mode is also too slow for my needs. I thought about a 60D, but Im gonna go the whole hog and get a 7D.

But as to what got me hooked? No idea. Im an engineer, I like mechanical things, I like the try it and see approach you get with photography (especially digital), I like the experimenting... what happens if I do this? what about this? I love thinking about how I might get a particular shot, what settings I might need, where I need to be placed etc etc. I love capturing action, but I hate doing things like portraits... for me, it feels like too much pressure to get it bang on perfect.
 
I have no clue where my desire to take pictures came from, but I do remember when I started. My parents gave me one of those first gen easy loading cameras when I was in middle school. I think it was called 110 film? Quality was horrible and the pictures were tiny, but it got the job done. That was just the beginning for me. When I got into high school and found out the school had a photography program I immediately wanted in.....problem was it was only offered to juniors and seniors. Id have to wait a few years. When I finally got in as a junior I know I impressed more than just my classmates in the darkroom. My senior year I was named photographer of the year and went on to win a few other awards. Ive had some college education on the subject, but nothing since that. I consider myself of average skill and simply do it as a hobby because of that fact. Id never make the cut professionally out there with competition such as Webb Bland and others. Then again, like many of you have said, maybe with age and experience im just becoming too critical or my work. I dont get a lot of love where I post. http://www.deviantart.com/download/139556267/Thick_by_MidEngine4Life.jpg http://www.deviantart.com/download/193793489/city_girl_by_midengine4life-d37do0h.jpg
 
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Once, many years ago, I spent some days in the local paper as part of a work experience program. Did some writing, story about a fishing boat and some other stuff. The paper gave me one of their cameras so I could put photos to the stories, and for a few days, I was loving the primitive, but lovely Nikon Coolpix 990. We were tought to press the camera tightly to our belly to get sharp images.

Well, when the editor asked me and the other pupil wether we wanted to be journalists when we grew up, to which my female companion replied 'no'. I said 'yes'. And then I said 'but probably a photographer'. So that was my earliest beginnings.

Fast forward a year, or two, I take my father's OM-2 with a Zuiko 28/2.0 on holiday. The only thing I knew was to put it on 'Auto' (or as we'd call it today, aperture priority), and my old man told me that I should twist the aperture ring (the thing on the front as I referred to it) to the lowest number, that would let in most light. Images were crap, but I really liked to photograph with it.

Fast forward a couple of years again. I get my first cell phone with a decent camera. It was some sort of Sony Ericsson, shot 3.2 mp images, and had a nifty flash. Now, I have never had a better camera phone than that. And that was in 2006. I took copius amounts of photos, and after a while, I started freelancing. With a cell phone as my camera. Most people nowadays (feels strange to talk about five years ago as the 'old days') think they need a 1Dmk4 with complementary 24-70 and 70-200 to shoot photos, those were the days, eh?

Then I studied journalism, got my first dSLR (E-400), but quickly realized that I spent more time taking photos than writing, I spent more time than most of the people doing photojournalism, in fact. Then I took a course in photojournalism, and the rest is history.

As a result, the only thing I know to do is this. Pity it's a crap market.

Anyhoo. Adapt, improve and move on, I guess.
 
If you're 25 or younger and use the phrase "back in the day", you deserved to be birched :p

Anyways, I see you managed to escape, even if momentarily, from the political section back into this one. Welcome back, nomix ;)
 
A friend of mine used to say "when I was young, during the 90s". She's 25.

I like coming back once in a while. I just don't have too much time for stills these days.
 
A few years ago, I became disgusted with the IQ of the night photos that came from my Sony point & shoot. I bought a DSLR with a kit lens......followed by a tele-zoom....and a flash....and 2 primes...and a good tripod.....and an ultra wide angle......and a hard case for everything......and the list goes on.....

Stands, umbrellas, another flash and some wireless transceivers are next.

If you're 25 or younger and use the phrase "back in the day", you deserved to be birched
Agreement.
 
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