How I became interested in photography

Today I asked my students to blog about how they first became interested in photography.  They suggested that I write my story so I have decided to follow their suggestion.

When I was growing up, my Uncle Rich had a Nikon SLR camera that I thought was really cool. He had extra lenses and he alway took a lot of photographs. I think he even brought back some cameras that he had purchased when he was in the Navy and stationed in the Mediterranean. Anyway, in addition to color images he also took a lot of black and white photos. I loved it when he got out his camera and let my sister and I look at it and even hold it- pretending to make photographs with it.
When I was in either 5th or 6th grade Uncle Rich bought me my first camera, a Kodak Instamatic that came in a yellow box. It was so thrilling to have my own camera so I could take photos of things I wa
wanted instead of using the family Brownie Hawkeye camera. He keep encouraging me to take photos and was always interested in the kinds of images I was making. In college, I finally made the big purchase and bought my first all-manual camera, an Olympus OM-1, for my photography class. He's a die-hard Nikon fan so we always had a friendly discussions about Nikon vs. Olympus. I still have all the cameras that were mine growing up and a couple of them are even in my collection that I display in my classroom for my students to hold and imagine using. Thanks, Uncle Rich for fostering my interest in photography.
Here's a photo of my first camera:

This is a close-up of the flash cube that you had to change after every 4 photos!