I'm 98% self-taught, but this includes a lot of self-guided reading of 'how to' books, a local photo club and other things that are clearly "learning" rather than trial-and-error.
The other 2% was a 4 day Underwater Photography class I took in 1990, roughly 20 years after I first dabbled with cameras as a kid. Yeah, I'm dating myself. Next thing you know, I'll be reminiscing about remembering that when I got my driver's licence, gasoline cost a whopping 62 cents a gallon.
This class was quite helpful in two ways. The first was for the photography challenges specific to the UW environment, and the second was that it spurred a greater interest in the technical nuts & bolts of imaging science, which was immediately applied to UW, but also folded back into my land photography and then expanded into that realm as well.
My dad had an SLR system from before I was born. Back then there were no automatic cameras In fact there was no place where to could put a battery in a camera.
No batteries ... ah, those were the days!
The earliest cameras I can remember being around the home was that my Dad had a 35mm rangefinder (an Argus) and my maternal grandfather had a bellows-type Polaroid. In looking at
Wiki, I'd say that the Polaroid was a "Highlander" .. the photo on the right looks like a Perfect Match from what I remember as a kid.
FWIW, one of the things I remember about this Polaroid was that the pictures frequently curled (this was rolled instant film, not the later flat stuff) and after the image was developed and fully dried (yeah, they came out wet!), you had a final step which was to take out this wet sponge thingie out of its little black storage tube and use it to squeegie a clear liquid onto the surface of the developed/dried image. I had no idea what it was at the time, but today I suspect that this was some sort of lacquor (or the like) to add a clear protective coating.
I think my first camera was a Polaroid 'Square Shooter' (1971). I still have a small stack of photos that I took with it (somewhere) as a pre-teen. I apparently had enough fun with it that a few years later, I got a Kodak 126 film camera...another Point n Shoot...which went with me on a high school Band trip to Rome, Italy. Still got some of those images stashed away too. Neither of these had any meaningful controls, so the only things to work on for improving was composition and knowing when to put a flash cube on for lighting.
He explained the basics of exposure because it was imposable to take a picture without understanding it. I bought an SLR when I was in the 8th grade and it was pretty advanced because it had a built in light meter. No auto modes just "match needle".
My High School graduation present was a Pentax K-1000 SLR. A fully manual camera with a "match needle" exposure system like the above. Someone must have shown me the basics of how to use it, but I can't recall anymore.
I still have that K (one of these days, I'll finally experiment with Infared film!), but added an auto-everyting modern SLR in the late 1990s, and chose the Canon EOS series at that time (Elan IIe). Just finally moved to digital for land photography a few years ago and the faster feedback loop and the "free" film paradigm has been a lot of fun to experiment & learn more.
Books are very important way to learn. I like the series by Ansel Adams. He wrote for the person who aspires to be a technical perfectionist like himself but he uses simple terms and examples and offers good advice along the way.
I've yet to specifically read Ansel's stuff. There's some 'how to' books by John Shaw that I've liked.
There's also a wonderful tutorial that was written by UW Photo Pro Jim Church prior to his death a few years ago. Its known within the UW community as "JIM CHURCH'S COWS' and it is beloved because Jim's humor shines through. Jim did give his permission to reprint his writings as a training guide prior to his death, so the writings live on:
In looking quickly through the above, I see that Roger's missing a few of the chapters; I'll have to go find the time to go dig through my old, old emails to find them and put them online myself and send Roger a copy for his webpage too.
-hh
