Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1998/12/03
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Hi Bill, When my daughter was 3, I brought her home a toy camera from one of my assignments. She was a bright kid and knew what dad did for a living and wanted to take pictures "like dad". It was a cheap $20 plastic thing but she used it and got the hang of "filling the viewfinder". A year later I gave her an old Olympus Stylus that was in the bottom of the cabinet. This year, at 5, she is very effective with the Olympus and we are working on the concept of focusing a Nikon F.... but this could take awhile. I guess my advice, especially if you are not going to be around all the time to help out, would be not to introduce concepts such as focus, depth of field, etc. Get him a durable point and shoot which the flash can be turned on or off manually and get him to concentrate on composition and framing for awhile. Once he gets that well defined and consistent, let him move on to the technical aspects. The few times I have had to teach people photography, I emphasized the WHY and WHAT they were photographing. Know exactly what it is you are trying to capture and exclude all that is not a part of the photo you want to make. Once they KNOW what they want to photograph, then they can work on the different techniques to do it. regards, Greg Locke <locke@straylight.ca> St. John's, Newfoundland. <http://www.straylight.ca/locke/> - ---------------------------------- "I've finally figured out what's wrong with photography. It's a one-eyed man looking through a little 'ole. Now, how much reality can there be in that?" -- David Hockney