I won a simple camera at our county fair.  A flimsy, plastic thing… it was a treasure to me.  And there began my own journey into photography.   That camera from the county fair was a primitive thing.  I stumbled into some of the more advanced concepts by another way.  I bought a fairly powerful telescope with money from my paper route.  I still have it!  (the telescope, not the paper route)  I was fascinated with its ability to render an image in razor sharp focus, with extreme out-of-focus areas in front of, and behind the area in focus.  Later, I would learn that this was called “Depth of Field.”  It didn’t matter, I was hypnotized by the ability to control what was in focus (and what was not).  I would look at the moon, and Saturn… and Jupiter, with its four visible moons.  I would view birds and other small animals, from several neighbor’s yards away.  The whole idea of looking at the world opened up, in degrees of in and out of focus.  I remember having cheap Kodak cameras and experimenting with composition.  Looking back on some of those images, the Rule of Thirds simply came to me, as naturally as breathing.  Cheap cameras, with B&W film… I would take the file to Baker’s Pharmacy and wait patiently for the week or so it took to get the images back.