>>4476808
When I turned 29

If you haven't publicly displayed or published a 100+ strong portfolio before 2017 under your own name, you can never be trusted as a photographer. You will just be considered a turd-polishing snapshitter who uses AI as a crutch. Assume every "photo" (image) is upscaled and using generative fill with entire elements faked including the subject. Fake grain, fake skies, fake depth of field. Fake fake fake.

Photography relies on the honor code and 2017 was the cutoff. Anyone on the scene after that is way too new to be trusted and most of their stuff will be fake. Photography is for established oldfags and nobody gives two shits about the new kids. Sorry, but you missed the boat faggots. Have fun drowning in a sea of your kin and never getting noticed or respected apart from fake likes and follows so you like and follow back.

-trusted published oldfag with a strong irl following

>>4476851
Comments and knowledge too. All anyone needs to do now is copy/paste ChatGPT and they do especially on /p/ where most posters are soulless life virgins. If you can't at least point to archive posts to prove otherwise you're doomed to mediocrity and irrelevance, whether it's posting a boring snapshit in the RPT or begging in the Insta threads like a panhandler. IG itself isn't even about photography, it's about forging a fake persona for yourself online because you're nothing in reality. Real photographers do their own thing.

>>4476851
>>4476858
Bitches

>>4476808
It really hit me at like 13 or 14. I took a point and shoot on a school trip and got one particularly cool photo and wanted to take more. Before that it was just messing around every now and again with disposables.

>>4476808
never cared much about photography myself despite enjoying visual art and photographs, but almost two years ago now my folks were like "we're gonna donate a bunch of old crap unless you want it" and for some reason I took their late 70s SLRs and the one telephoto lens my dad had. been shooting ever since, really enjoying the process and taking the time to document my own life/places I go/etc. its nice having some images that feel less disposable than a phone snapshit that I may well never look at again. anyway I'm almost 35 now.

>>4476851
telling other people they are ngmi when the question is "when did you discover this" is a hallmark of a successful person with a very stable mental state I'm sure.

>>4476864
>missed the boat
Oof. Shoulda promoted yourself, kid.

>>4476808
14ish, took first trip to Europe and took pictures like crazy on it with my ancient digishit
Started working at camera shop / photo lab at 17, found p, and started first paid photo work shortly after and just kept it going between working at different shops, shooting full time, shooting part time + regular job, to mostly shooting for fun + more picky about paid work
That was like 16 years ago now lol, but didn't get into video really until 3-4 years ago

>>4476894
Wow, same here. 14-ish, trip to Europe and lots of digishit photos. Also started working at a camera shop/photolab at 17 and started my first paid photo work shortly thereafter and just kept it going between working at different shops, shooting fulltime, shooting part time plus regular job, mostly shooting for fun and more picky about paid work. About 16 years ago for me too, and I am nearly 4 years into video too!

>>4476896
Do you also have a corgi?

>>4476808
I got a Samsung digishit for Christmas when I was six years old so probably then. I’d love to see the photos I took back then but they’re all gone -_-,

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>>4476808

Once i learned I liked the idea of being an artist, but couldn't draw or paint for shit. My parents got me my first camera at 12 and would never stop raving about my "artistic ability". I submitted a macro picture of a flower to the Idaho state fair and it got first place in its division (pic related). It was all down hill from there.

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>>4476808
it was an arranged marriage type, love came after. i was 20, working online and making good money for the first time, so i started thinking what should i get with it:
> always liked cameras
> look up dslr tutorials
> get hooked to the simplicity and the mechanical nature of it all
> army service made me postpone a purchasing decision, so i had a couple years deciding on a camera make which in turn sent me down the technical rabbit hole
> ended up getting my first full frame dslr and went crazy with it.

>>4476876
You talk like a movie character.

>>4476876
I'm truly, deeply sorry, anon. I won't disappoint you next time, I promise!

4

>>4476808
I got into it in 2017 when I was in college after a bad break up. I fell out of it after graduating though because work got too busy
Since then I changed jobs and started going out more and doing things and I got fully back into almost a year ago now

>>4476808
when i was like 15 i got a slr and some film n it was fun :p

35 because "midlife crisis", just wanted to enjoy life more and trying new things. It was either a camera or a motorcycle, went with the former + home gym

>It was either a camera or a motorcycle
Get both, it's a killer combo. Ride out to random places for a day and get some pics while you're at it. That's what I do when I'm fed up with the shitheels that infest city-life.

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got on of those my first (35mm) cameras when i was a kid and got a dslr when i was 16 or so, stopped shooting digital now, film is where its at

>>4476808
Around 22... and then my life went to shit and I lost all interest, and only took it back up again when I was 35.

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17 in 2015. Did a photography class in highschool. We used Film SLRs with a darkroom. It was fun going around campus then inding out our photos were complete shit and out of focus after exposing our black and white photos. Now I just like taking photos or small videos of comfiness around the world.

>>4476808
I live in a town city (a town that over my life industrialized into a city). This town city is located in foothills, the hills are a 100 km away. Where my house is, from the ceiling you can see Mount Kanchenjunga in clear winter days, with the smaller hills always being visible on any clear day. Also parts of my town are still pretty rural, there were more, but is become less now. Being in such a place of different aesthetics, whenever i visited the hills, i wished to capture it, same for the rural areas. One fine winter day 6 years ago, i got to see Mount Kanchenjunga in pristine clarity, at that moment i decided that my smartphone was not enough and i finally picked up my dads dslr. Have learnt the basics, still a noob. I really appreciate the masters before me and their techniques. Visting this board and studying up techniques and post process has made me appreciate this art much more. It has also increased my scope from just hills. Photography is one of the few things that gives me genuine happiness.

>>4482917
>you can see Mount Kanchenjunga in clear winter days,

In your area the is much to shoot. Beautiful part of the world

>14 years. old start taking photos of random shit on my dad's 4mp bridge camera. gives me his ae-1 and I start taking photos of my friends skateboarding
>15 years old. friends are way better than me at skateboarding and I can't skate the spots so i start to just hangout and shoot photos instead

>>4476808
When I was in my teens back in the late 90s my old man designated me the family photographer with his ae1 lol. It’s been an on and off relationship since then. But it’s one of those things that even if I stop for months or years I always eventually come back around. Like RuneScape lol

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>>4476808
I took a photo of my grandpa when I was seven. It looked good with him and the background.
I realised that I had an eye for a photo in my 20s. Never had a camera until I got a smartphone when I was 32, and I became a snapshitter extraordinaire. Sadly, my attempts to parlay that into IG success and possibly an income failed miserably after persisting for four years, now I just snapshit when I'm at the park each Saturday in one of my rare times outside.

When I was 4 years old in 1972.

>>4476808
Well like most people in this biz, I got my start as an actor. There I am on the first day on the set, and there's this guy fucking me from behind, right, and there are these two huge guys dressed like cops in my mouth at the same time and I remember thinking to myself, "I like acting. I wanna study".

>>4486095
What sort of things do you post, old timer? What threads?

>>4477596
i still have my e-420, my first dslr
went to a 50d then 5dii, also got a gh5

but now film is where its at, got me a m6 + rz67 and a few others, started with a OM1

>>4486171
>Mighty Aphrodite
Good flick, saw it in the theater, the whole place lol’d at that line.

>>4486254
As a recent graduating filmfag, I'm starting to believe film is the endgame.
A shame that the hardware is all aging out and there will come a time where all you can buy is cheap PnS's or chinesium instant film bodies.

the last 6 or 7 years. i decided i needed to figure out how to take photos of my sculptures and other art to document them myself. adter a while the photos became just as much as the work as the subjects i had made.

i’m 42.

>>4476808
>at what age
8? 9? Thereabouts.

when i was a kid and got my first phone i wouldn't really take pictures since i was scared of the camera (parents are conspiracy nutjobs), but i still really enjoyed taking pictures. got my first (shitty) camera at 17 and borrowed my friend's cameras, which were canon's. really loved playing with the settings and stuff.

i want to get back into it, and i bought a nikon off of someone a while ago and just havent used it yet.

Id say its really built up over the course of my life though. I took one good shot of my now deceased cat when I was super young and I always thought it really captured her. Have been into fashion and aesthetics in my early 20s, worked on a golfcourse and snapshotted alot of sick landscapes. When I was 25 I bought a Polaroid to snap moments cause me and a gf were hanging out with a music scene crowd, local bands and the like. The final "nail" was a high school buddy's little sister who was a massive poser in everything she did all of a sudden had their mom get her a digital camera and she started a "photography business". I sat there grimacing at her stuff a bit and told myself "if Im gonna sit here and grade this as dogshit I might as well figure out how to do better myself." Bought a minolta x700 in Chicago, moved to Atlanta with some friends and spent 4 years basically running around and learning how to shoot manual, develope/scan, edit. The perpetual learning has kept it fun. Currently working as a school portrait and sports photographer

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>>4476851

i faked before faking was cuul. man, remember 2017?

>gatekeeping on a redditboard disguised as an edgeboard, possibly the least visited and most forgettable board of all time

>scene

scene/10 would skim again

>>4476808
I did film photography in school. I gave a bit of shit, but then didn't bother for a long time. Then my friend bought a camera to take pro looking photos of his car so I got a camera too. I also discovered that you should never get into commercial photography work, since it will completely zap your interest in photography.

>>4488357
As somebody looking to take on side gigs doing photography, especially product photography, I'm well aware of this opinion. Would you mind elaborating on it anyway? I'd like to hear more anecdotes about hobbyists going pro to any degree.

>>4488425
It probably varies person to person but there's no doubt overlap. For me, it was that creativity or your own methods will always take a backseat to what a client wants, and also that it becomes too clinical like it's just mass production of the same thing over and over (maybe sort of like if you were a painter that did landscapes in your free time and then your job just became to paint a wall a solid color or just paint the same exact landscape over and over).

Time also disappears. I was doing 10-14 hours a day every day and I'd still be getting called or emailed into the evening or night with requests ("photoshop this out, do you have one from this angle, can you come back again tomorrow" etc etc) and every person assumes you work just for them and don't have a half dozen other clients you just saw on the same day that also want shit done. And everyone always wants things instantly or changes their mind and needs you to come back again to do it your way like you advised from the start since their way looked like shit.

After doing so many hours every day of photography and everything that comes with it, I didn't want to go out and do it for fun anymore. Unless you truly live and breath for photography or get total creative freedom or already have so much money that you can just choose your clients and schedule, it's not enjoyable as a job.

>>4488476
Sounds like you just had shitty clients anon.
In fairness I only ever worked for real estate but if I were doing work for individual clients I'd be drawing up T&Cs that mandate you can't fucking contact me outside of work hours and expect shit to be done.
I would set clear guidelines from the get-go that the reason you hired me is because you liked how my portfolio looked. If you want to make changes, I am okay with that but you risk straying further from what you saw me produce. If you backtrack on this later I WILL charge you a "fuckwit thinks he knows more" fee. Obviously word it nicer, but it wouldn't be hard to draw up a contract.
Also, extra fees for reshoots. Post processing requests are billable. Running over schedule incurrs a late fee and also puts you in a lower priority.

>>4488499
>Sounds like you just had shitty clients anon.
It's more or less the whole industry, you'll find that shit in all areas really. I imagine this is probably the same crap that a lot of industries also go through and I've no doubts it's what painters dealt with in previous centuries (I even recall some famous artworks have intentional mistakes in them as a "fuck you" to their clients).

>In fairness I only ever worked for real estate
I think most of us have been in real estate at one time or another. Real estate agents are really pushy and want results basically within the hour in some cases. I remember I could finish a house and get a call to ask if I can have all the photos ready in only an hour, as if I didn't have more houses to go to or other agents that I'd booked with. They also all know you work with multiple agents but don't care, they want to be priority. I hate to say it but photographers are treated like absolute bitches in all indusrties.

I also worked in the movie industry and you bet your ass I got treated like dirt there too. So today I do photography exclusively for fun and I sometimes will do portraits for people or do photo work at cosplayer events, but that's it.

>>4476808
6. Got a brand new Olympus Mju II. Shot the fuck outta that camera for years until the AF died I think, at least the lens stopped doing its sexual in-out movement. Was retarded, gave that to my uncle for repairs, as he was repairing TVs and shit, he was also retarded also for accepting to repair it lel. That was the end of that camera. Later, worked for a few months and got me my first APSC DSLR and the rest is history. Shooting mostly short movies for shits and giggles now, which nobody will ever see. Just like my photos.

>>4488576
lol, I've had mostly good experiences with all my clients

>>4476808
At 41yo, when I inherited all 14,000 of my fambly photos to deal with. Gaddauym, fuggin SLIDES?? Wtf man, what am I going to do with all these fucking things, I should just toss em. And negatives, I can’t even see what’s on those to figure out if I have prints of em.

Start scanning prints, everything looketh like shit, look up how to better scan olde photos in highest quality…. 5 years later I’ve got a degree w a minor in photo, built my own slide/neg drum digitizer & processes, shoot architecture (not real estate) for a living w MF digishit & LF environmental/birding/macro for fun. And I’m still only 10% of the way through those slides, w 50 fucking started projects surely never to be completed, like a true artiste.

>>4488889
Pay a shop to do it @ $20 per roll lmao.

>>4488889
14kf frames?

Someone I know bought a cheapo canon rebel and sigma 70mm macro and valoi scanning kit to do 750 negs and did the laziest ever negative lab pro fixes because their family’s standard was "as long as we can tell whats on them"

Good luck!

>>4488889
Bless you for going through the collection, plus now you can turn your relative into the next Vivian Meyer
Post some for us

>>4488889
post your family anon

>>4476808
13, I got bullied in school, came back home crying, found a camera and then got lost in it for hours. Photography gave so much consolation over the years.

>>4490485
then you got bullied again because the camera you found 1 year ago was a SNOY