In the early nineties, between the ages of, I would guess, about 4 and 10, I used to occasionally attend the St. Albans Camera Club with my mum who was a fairly regular attendee. I can't say I remember much about the photographs, more the rattle and clack of the slide projector during slide competitions and the orange squash at the interval. But I'm sure some of it stuck. There are flashes of particular photographs still in my mind today.
I remember attending many competitions (mostly without entering, except as a photographic subject), and a few lectures, including one about digital manipulation which seemed extraordinary at the time...
I didn't take much myself, mostly I just left it to my mum - in a way I grew up with photography around - my parents actually met at a camera club. we had a darkroom and everything. Terms like exposure, aperture, shutter speed, film speed were familiar, but I didn't really understand them, although occasionally I would have a go at fiddling with these settings on someone else's SLR.
I did own an inherited automatic camera and I even won an 'imprints' (4x6) competition at the age of 9 (which had 5 or 6 entrants) with a picture of a bird drinking from a water fountain in the Piazza del Campo. There was nothing technically impressive about it because as far as I was concerned I just pointed the camera and pressed the shutter - but I guess the composition was good, the timing was right, and the auto settings happened to produce something with a relatively shallow depth of field.
I only really started taking pictures for myself in 2009/10 when I received (and subsequently broke) my mum's old 20D. Then I posted here for advice and discovered a whole world of potential expensive purchases just waiting for me.
But in short, most of my actual 'knowledge' is just from google. (not that I'm a master photographer or anything) I did buy a book once about dSLRs but I never read it.
