I used to teach a B&W photography course at the San Diego Ocean Beach Free School. I was really into it back then and spent almost as much money on camera equipment and lenses as I did on motorcycle things.
On the first day of classes I would haul in all my stuff and lay out some big 13x19" prints that I had made. As the students filtered in I invited them to look over what I had laid out. At the start of class I asked them what they thought and inevitably the comments went something like, "If I had equipment like yours I could take great pictures too"
After a bit of discussion I pulled an old Kodak Brownie from my pack and explained that every one of the pictures they had just praised was made with this simple camera. Some of them were amazed and some thought I was making a joke.
I pulled out more of them and handed them to the students. They were yard sale finds at a dollar apiece. Some were dismayed that they wouldn't be using their fancy Nikons and Pentaxes and expressed the opinion that they should be able to use whatever they wanted.
I explained to them that the camera did not take the picture. The eye, the mind, and the heart took the picture. The camera was just a clever mechanism for capturing what the eye saw, the mind imagined, and the heart felt.
Some students never came back but most of them got it. They had fun experimenting with the limitations of the Brownies and getting to know what the interplay of light and shadow was.
When they had exposed 3-4 rolls of film I showed them how to develop it and how to make prints with yard sale enlargers. There is a great satisfaction in seeing the joy in a person's face as their first print comes slowly to life in the developer tray.
I taught the course for a couple of years. To me, the photography lesson was learning the eye, mind, heart connection. The rest was just physics and chemistry.
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