[Robert Watcher]

The E3 is a fair chunk of camera. I told Mason that it was pretty heavy. I handed the camera to him and he said "that's not that heavy" and carried it all over the property for about 2 hours. Although if I had a flash on top, I think that may have put it over the top for him.
There are always all kinds of panicky looks from people and all kinds of chuckles at the way he handles the cameras. Most people would never give a child a camera and leave them to go where they want with it - let alone an expensive looking one like I have. I handed Mason his first digital camera (a point and shoot) to use when he was about 3 years old and at any family and friend functions where both he and I are there and I have my cameras with me, he gets to be the official photographer.
Of course this is nothing new for me, my wife or my 4 children - - - all of our kids had free access to using my equipment from a very early age, and all worked with me in my color darkroom from the time they were Mason's age, and when in their early teens were left in my downtown studio with my big studio lights and Mamyia RZ67 to shoot each other and be as creative (and generally as weird) as they wanted to be. They didn't think anything of it or that it was anything special or difficult - - - just as it is with Mason now. Even with that though, only one of my children has any interest in photography on a serious level, although he isn't interested in making money from it.
I never trained them or directed them - it was all through osmosis and handling the equipment and figuring it out themselves. It was comical on Saturday - - - there are a lot of big windows in my daughters house and when I gave Mason the camera I showed him on the screen that people in front of the window would be dark if he included the window, so he may want to shoot on an angle so that a wall is in behind. After he was gone for about 5 minutes, he comes up to me and says "Gandpa, the people don't have to be dark in front of a window - all you have to do is pop up the flash and it's perfect. " he then proceeded to show me a before and after with and without the flash. Firstly I never even showed him how to pop up the flash - and secondly he had figured out how to run all of the "video controls" on the back of the camera to zoom in and scroll around the displayed image on the screen. It sure didn't take long for him to get a grip on many of the functions of the camera and make use of them, even though he didn't know technically what they were doing or how to use them.