What drove or inspired you to take up photography?

ridgycactus

ridgycactus

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Hi guys n girls

Did still photography at school and it always stuck in my mind for some reason,
Long story short bought a d5300 couple of lenses and wish i did this years ago,

But what makes us want to capture those moments?,

Art, emotions, memories, the challenges.
The perfect shot,
Taking pictures of the world around so as to escape the world momentarily whilst changing how the world looks in Photoshop.

Just interested in what motivated people to begin with and what they enjoy about photography?
Cheers Ivor



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An inner desire to capture things that I see that i think are beautiful.

It's not really about the perfect shot, I don't know what the perfect shot is but there is only 1 question when I come to critique my photograph.

"What story is this image telling?"

If I had to explain it, then I can do better.
 
Raymond Lin said:
An inner desire to capture things that I see that i think are beautiful.
Click to expand...

That answers the second question for me. With the additional point that what I see may not always be what others might see, and I like to reveal as well as record.

In my case the original motivation was the thrill of taking the only photo on the roll from a borrowed-for-the-holiday box camera that had a level horizon. That was back in the 1950s. I moved from box cameras to 35mm. medium format and then large format film. At which point I stuck.
 
Wanted to have memories so started off with a brownie 127 and took photos of gran and relatives no longer with us, best thing ever did photographic wise. Now have my wife children and grandchildren in pictures
 
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Not being able to draw the curtains, let along get an accurate representation of a scene in front of me!
 
Wanted pictures of my kids. This then evolved into an interest in the science/physics of it all. Then a realisation it can feature alongside other hobbies and interests - walking/climbing, cooking, etc. Then I discovered lighting, which is a slippery slope to expense and moving house just to get a better room you can use as a studio :)

I love photography and just need to keep shoe-horning in enough time outside of work to do it!
 
I was a friends house and he started taking pictures of bees on a flower , next thing I did was get an SLR and tried doing it myself. Twenty years later its still as frustrating a hobby as it was then lol.
 
ridgycactus said:
Hi guys n girls

Did still photography at school and it always stuck in my mind for some reason...
Click to expand...

Cruella De Vil made me do it

Weird how your early years shape your interests in later life, quite often your opportunities to follow them are curtailed by more important events, like work, relationships and life in general.
 
I distinctly remember walking home from college one day saw the sky and the street light just came on, and I held up both my hands, index and thumb with an L shape and starting to frame the shot. I bought a Canon EOS 30 with eye control.

It was the age of film and it is expensive to shoot and process every roll, especially as a student, so I didn't use that much, I did learn what all the settings do on the camera and a few things stuck with me at the time.

1 - Someone I met online call Auto as Idiot mode. As such, I never used it in any of my cameras.
2 - Try to capture the story

When I went back to uni to do my post grad I bought a Canon A60 compact. That was basically the camera that I learned how to take pictures, not so much in terms of lighting or even composition, but the basics of the moment and the story.

I took photos every day of my friends, it serves as my foundation. When I finished university and started working I bought a 30D, somehow got convinced to shoot my friend's wedding but somehow it clicked...everything I leaned before just came together. The principle of what I learned on the compact and film transferred, and when I got my 5D2 that is when everything clicked. I was able to get photos that I had in my mind all these years.
 
Wow
Amazing how things influence our lives and we later find our interests,

For me ,my older brother had this fasinating gadget, mid 1970s ,Pentax I think and he showed me what you could do with it!.
From then it was embedded in my mind,

Got to secondry school, given options, took still photography without a second thought due to my memories.

Life took over but still every once in a while had this hankering to get a camera,

So eventually I did and it has fasinated me since,
Still at the, ahem "trying too hard to get it right stage!" ,
But then that's part of the learning curve which inevetibly leads you to the getting it right stage, you hope,

Wether I get good or bad shots I enjoy being out with my camera


Well A good picture is a bonus, but practice makes for more enjoyment.

Cheers Ivor
 
I was about 9 years old and I was given a very cheap and nasty point and shoot as a birthday or Christmas present (this was in the days shortly after film had been invented............). The camera was garbage, my photography was garbage. Most of the shots didn't come out at all (ahhhh.......cheap film....!) but out of that first roll of black and white film I got one decent shot, which was of someone's dog, and it was enough to hook me. Though I was into adulthood before I could afford an slr (still before digital had been invented) I was never without a camera of some sort. Now I see 9 year old kids walking around with higher spec dslrs than mine. It's scary. I doubt very much if they've ever had the feeling I had when I saw that one good print off my first ever film.
 
My nan gave me an old box camera when I was about 4. Used birthday money to buy film 12 shots B&W, which taught me a lot about getting it right in camera and of getting t wrong. Manual focus, aperture etc.
One of the first images I took, of my family in a local park
156825852.jpg
 
My interest started a few back when I wanted to document another hobby I had at the time.

From about 2005 to 2008 I was competing in something called IASCA (International Auto Sound Challenge Association) which basically involved putting sound systems in cars to achieve a proper Audiophile experience and then being judged on the sound quality at various events around the country. I actually did alright winning the UK championship for a couple of years and also a Eurasian championship once for my class.

At the time my only camera was a Nikon coolpix something or other which was old, knackered and had sticky buttons from being covered in sambuca on one too many lads holidays. So I picked up a canon 400D and kit lens and went off from there.

Ended up using it a lot more than I expected and started enjoying the photography side of things in it's own right. One year at Bug Jam at Santapod a few of us ended up in the party marquee and I brought my camera along for that and enjoyed that environment and style of photography so I got in touch with some old contacts from my days of working in nightclubs and got a job in one as their photographer.

It all evolved from there and has almost gone full circle where I am now at a point where I am considering selling up all together.
 
For me the first inspiration came from my uncle who was living in Switzerland at the time (1970s) and when he came to visit us in the U.K. brought amazing pictures and his medium format film camera. After a few false starts trying my hand at photography the second inspiration came from my daughter who wanted to try too and then we started to get into it together. My uncle has since passed on and left me the film camera and a long term project is to get it working again and reshoot some of the same places he did with it 50 years later.
 
My father taught me to develop and print when I was 8 years old. He bought me a Kodak 127 and I was away.
 
I got a loan of my uncles video camera when I was about 13-14 and started videoing anything with a big engine in it, trains planes, ships ect.. I was having great fun and watching back the clips was great but I really wanted something I could put on the wall. You could pull stills from it but they were something like 480 pixels on the long edge so I moved onto my mothers 35mm point and shoot and year or so later my first 35mm film SLR and never looked back.
 
being a keen hill walker and rock climber in my mid-teens, took up photography to record walks and climbs. My climbing partner was even more keen on it than me, which spurred me on to try harder to get "good" pictures not just simple record shots. Back in film era, obviously, as I'm an old git - we actually developed films and printed our shots in the school darkroom...

My mate went on to art college, then film school, then came home and made a passable living as a pro photographer - I helped him out where needed (and where it fit into my own "normal" day job) but I was still striving to produce quality work (so as to not look a complete numpty to my mate!)

Even now, my first thought when I look at my initial downloads from the memory card is "what would Martin say about this..."

Sadly, he's not around to ask, he passed away a few years ago... but, after 30+ years of recieving his "frank" critique, generally I know what it'd be... "bin it, do it again properly."
 
In 1984 for our first Christmas as a married couple, I bought my wife a Pentax ME Super. She used it a lot, and started to let me use it. The rest, as they say, is history.....
 
Beint able to capture crisp photos that i can look back on and show my kids in years to come.
... still trying to capture a crisp photo lol
 
My lovely cat was PTS and I had no decent photos of her... I'd been saving for a DSLR for a while, and husband took me out afterwards and bought me my first one Nikon D5000, and I've not looked back since (and have now replaced 3 cats with 3 dogs, and spend all my time taking pics of them ;) .... and to me, they are the most beautiful things in the world :love: )
 
My inspiration was my kids. I wanted to start taking pictures of them from day dot.
I've tried to learn different techniques through YouTube and from the forum.
 
I bought myself a 1930s Agfa folding camera when I was 18 because it looked interesting. While trying it out I had the epithany that a photograph does not need to be a photograph OF something. It can just be a photograph. Back then, all my pictures were of parts of derelict industrial buildings - series of arches being a firm favourite of mine.

Also lead on to me collecting old cameras which are interesting.
 
Well,what a great question.

My Mum,who educated and introduced me my brother and sister into this world on her own,my father died when I was one year old my sister was five and Mum was carrying my brother.

This was 1951 and through the difficult years, Mum built a career for herself and her family.

My early years were filled with wonderful European holidays and Mum always had the camera,I think an Agfa,still in the loft and always slide film and when we arrived home and after development we had the slide show,just fantastic with all the close family there.

When I was eighteen,some 40 years ago, I was given a Zorki 4 with all the kit and used that for a year,then to my amazement my girlfriends,(now my wife} Dad gave me a Canon AT with 50mm f1.8.

That is the moment I got started.

After now some 43 years,I shoot mainly film still,with some 40 film camera,s in tow,supported by a Nikon D700 and two Fuji camera,s a XE1 and Xpro1 ,plus about 40 selected lenses (a bit of a collector) :)

The best thing that ever happened to me as leave it,not love it,you can always go back to it,photography that is.
 
In abliity to draw.
 
A tour guide who wasn't impressed by my photos. The frustration of not being able to convert my images into sketches/paintings etc still narks me. The images I take give me lots of ideas that I'd like to convert into other medium (?)
 
A photograph of someone's pub lunch :) it was taken on a 5D Mark II, and it had a creamy bokeh to it... I thought 'how can i do that?'

Seeing how much a 5dm2 was I thought I'd never spend that much on a camera.. instead bought a Sony A580, bought a 5dm2 within a year, and now I've spent much more..
 
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I was a teenager at school. I only took up photography because the school's photography club was using one of the 6th form girls (who I had a huge crush on) as a portrait model. It was a good excuse to be in the same room as her.

Regrettably, she didn't feel the same about me :-(
 
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