The start of everything
I knew nothing much about cameras when I was young. I got to push down the trigger on my Grandma's Brownie Hawkeye camera for the rare times I was allowed to take photos of the grown ups. This was a camera that the only thing you could do was to literally point and click. There were no adjustments to make before you took a shot, and just a quick wind of the film advance knob when you were ready to take another picture. The only thinking required was in keeping track of the frame number while winding. There wasn't a lot of photos taken in those days - other than birthdays and Christmas, or when a relative visited from another state.
After I made it to my teen years, something changed for me after seeing a camera that wasn't in the shape of a box; and with a few adjustments to its knobs and levers, it could do all sorts of things that no box camera could ever do. I wanted more than the Brownie experience and that meant I would have to do it on my own. My family wasn't cash-happy, so nobody was about to buy another camera setup for me.