Such a lot of great stories here! I think it's funny how many of us got started with a Kodak Instamatic:
Originally posted by photocles My photographic "evolution" began with hand-me down C126 Instamatics and (really, really lousy) pics of my family and friends.
Originally posted by dlh 1965: First roll of color film - Kodak 100 Instamatic w/Kodachrome (35mm cartridge snapshot camera w/fixed lens). Taken from the parking lot of George Washington High School, Alexandria, VA (one of the three schools merged into T.C. Williams when the City of Alexandria desegregated its school system in 1971 - "Remember the Titans").
Originally posted by Liney Around 14 I got a Kodak Instamatic for Christmas, a cassette of 12 or 24 exposures and a "cube" of four flash bulbs. It got me into thinking about composition carefully (developing was expensive so each image wasn't wasted} and it lasted me for a few years until I left school and signed up to the military.
I got my own Kodak Instamatic when I was seven. It wasn't new technology then - 1979. My dad did repairs for a local camera shop, and he repaired this left-behind Instamatic that nobody really wanted back - and it fell into my hands. I was in love with photography from the beginning: Capturing time, and making my own private world visible in a world where children were much less in focus than today, for better or worse. When I turned 14, my brother said that if you flipped through my photos fast enough, it would be a stop-motion rendition of my life. All my pocket money went into film and development.
By then I had advanced to a left-over Yashica, and during my teenage years I went through a lot of left-over second hand SLRs, Konica, Minolta, Olympus. I stuck with Olympus, and even had a fully manual 300mm at some point.
Then digital photography arrived, and I was a student, and couldn't afford the cameras. My first digital was a Kodak superzoom - can't recall the model now, but I was absolutely blown away by the freedom to experiment without having to pay for film and development! This was also when I had my first kids, and my family joked that they were the most photographed children in Denmark. (They weren't, by the way, only by within-family-comparison!) I stayed with compact for some years, but in 2008 I decided that I had to get back to dSLR. Nature photography was always a main interest of mine, and I needed more creative control. I chose Pentax because of weatherproofing, in-house stabilisation and good build quality. K10d - I really loved that camera!
I remember some of my friends warned me about choosing Pentax: They said lenses would be hard to come by, and that AF wasn't up to standards. The lens thing was never really an issue - I have always been limited by economy rather than availability - but I admit to sometimes suffering from AF-envy when I am shooting birds in the company of Nikon-shooters. Maybe next year, that envy will be a thing of the past...
Evolution? Hmm. I have definitely improved my birds-in-flight, and the fact that AF-performance isn't world class might actually have helped with that, because it forces you to think ahead. But other than that, I think most of my recent advances have been driven mainly by this forum: When I first joined back in 2010 my first activity was to join a "12 days of Christmas" photo challenge, and it really helped force me into trying out new things. And in general, seeing all the creative work of you lot has been a great inspiration!