Most definitely one of my most primary special interests that is more or less around 39 years old. Longer even if I go back to high school when I was taught to develop my own black and white film. About a dozen years later I got my first single-lens-reflex 35mm camera (Canon AE-1 Program) and started taking adult education classes to learn better technical skills and composition. Loved it both technically and creatively, though I always thought composition was my weak point.
I would go on to have two girlfriends at different times who also found photography to be a passion of theirs as well. Fun times. One loved to pose for pictures which got me into portrait photography, while the other (I met in photography school) had a much keener sense of composition that I could ever have. Plus she was using a professional level of equipment at the time. And I was developing my own black and white film images using a secondary walk-in closet as an improvised darkroom. Didn't have the best equipment, but it was a lot of fun nevertheless.
Later my photography hobby would take a backseat to another hobby that profoundly became a special interest- website design. A skill that I enjoyed so much I began to pursue the idea of doing such work professionally, which involved an industry demand to be proficient using Photoshop.
About a decade later while I was no longer doing website design so much, the digital camera craze took off and I would later buy my first digital camera. Wow. Everything changed when I started applying my Photoshop skills to the digital images I had created using my camera. A "perfect storm" of applying my technical skills and creativity. Where I could optimize so many issues of each picture I took far, far beyond anything I could achieve in my improvised darkroom. And not just in black and white, but also color. To this day I have so much fun improving and altering images in a "digital darkroom" (my computer) that doesn't require any chemicals, let alone a pitch-black closet.
LOL...though my sense of composition has yet to get beyond the "mediocre" stage. Oh well...I love it anyways.