It depends on the child. When I was 12, my mom gave me her Argus C3 (my father bought her a new Kodak Retina IIIc). When I was 13, my grandfather loaned me his Rolleiflex Automat. That was at the start of High School. The following Summer, I took all the money I'd saved over the course of the year and my uncle supplemented it to help me buy a Nikon F. Later that same Summer, I'd saved up another $100 and bought a pair of decrepit Leica II cameras at one of the big camera shops in Manhattan.
If you're going to learn to shoot with film, you're going to make some mistakes and get some crap results along the way. It's part of the process of learning. To protect a child from that is a waste of time, and doesn't help them learn. I made many mistakes in those first couple of years and created a bunch of really bad junk. But I learned a whole lot, and by the third year I was shooting semi-professionally on the weekends as a second for a wedding photog. Godfrey > On Aug 1, 2014, at 6:50 PM, John Coyle <[email protected]> wrote: > > Thanks Brian, Darren, and John for thoughts. Larry, I just think that an SLR > might be daunting for > a youngster, although I am sometimes inclined to give an older SLR (like an > SV with the accessory > meter) so that the basics can be learnt while still having quality results. > There is little more > disappointing for someone starting out than getting crap results, IMO. > Still debating! -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
