Way back when I was 15/16 I took a black and white photography course in high school... that was about 35 years ago, and about the only thing I remember from that course is the "rule of thirds" (if you don't know what that is, google it, there's probably lots of better explanations than I can give out there). that's about it for my formal training.
Some years ago my wife and I planned a trip to Kona and we bought a waterproof aps film camera that I think we used a couple times snorkeling... it went bye bye for 4-5 bucks in a garage sale a couple years ago I think. It was that trip that I finally (literally one of my first memories in life was a neighborhood kid in Columbus, Ohio -where I moved from at the age of 2 and a half- standing in a wading pool in a "frogman" suit - I wanted to be a "frogman" ever since) got scuba certified . After getting scuba certified in Kona, we went back to Corvallis, Oregon to dive in the fun waters off the Oregon coast. We ended up picking up a Sea and Sea MX10 film camera, which was a nice and relatively easy to use camera in it's own right... that also went bye bye in the garage sale.
I quickly learned something about film cameras underwater.... if you really have no clue what you're doing, you can waste an entire roll of film REAL FAST. Once you start to figure things out, at least a the level I was able to figure out what I was doing, you can actually get maybe a couple pictures you like out of a roll of film (note: odds are if you stick with the photography thing you'll probably look back at your early pictures and think less of them than you did at the time).
After moving to Kona Hawaii, I used that MX10 for a year or two. One day we were at Costco and they had a 4 megapixel Olympus for sale for $400 or so and I figured I had to try it... I ordered a housing for it via mail order and from there started my journey....
Aloha,
Steve
