The other day kunulo posted a piece about analogue photography:
=>gemini://kunulo.smol.pub/2026-09-06-photography
I had just finished drafting my own thoughts on a similar topic, so I've waited a few days before I post them. Here they are.
Currently I have two 35mm film cameras, both of which I bought new. They are a Nikon FM2 which I got in 1998 and a Pentax 17 half-frame camera which I bought in 2025. In the nearly 50 years since I received that first Instamatic I've had quite a few film and digital cameras. Here are the ones I can remember, in chronological order:
Yes, that's quite a few. I may have forgotten some. But there are good reasons why I still have the Nikon FM2 and why I bought the Pentax 17. Also why the Sony RX10 is never used, but that's not really important.
This is a mechanical 35mm film camera. It does have a tiny battery which lasts, seemingly, forever, but that just powers the light meter. The camera itself will work perfectly well without it, and it is a beautiful piece of engineering. The film advance is smooth, the shutter goes from 1 second to 1/4000th of a second, it's precise and accurate and it gives a satisfying but quiet metallic clunk when it's released. I only have the standard manual-focus 50mm lens for it, which covers f1.8 to f22, and it is fast enough and sharp enough. It is a camera you know you are carrying and I will never part with it.
I love that nothing on this camera is automatic. You meter the scene, make a decision about exposure, set the shutter speed and aperture manually, focus manually, advance the film manually, rewind the completed film manually, load the new film in the same way. It is a completely manual experience which requires the photographer to understand what they are doing and to engage with the process, to pay attention, to take photos mindfully.
Pentax caused great excitement in the film photography community when they announced the 17. It is a fairly basic fixed focal-length half-frame camera which takes 72 images on a roll of 35mm film, which would only give 36 images in a standard 35mm camera. It has a very decent lens, a bright optical viewfinder, manual film advance and four fixed-focus zone settings. In some respects it's a bit like a simple point-and-shoot camera from the 1960s or '70s, but it has a good light meter and a number of shooting modes and exposure controls and options.
What I like is that the half-frame images use (unsurprisingly) half the amount of film as a 35mm image and so when printed at 6x4 inch size they have a slightly old-fashioned, lo-fi look. And you get a lot of photos for your money. I also like the controls - it's simple while also being sophisticated enough to give you creative choices and to need you to understand what you are doing. It's another camera demanding mindful use.
The world is awash with digital photos. Billions of people seem to want to share them, even images of their lunch, which I find bizarre. I do take digital photos on my phone and I make sure they are backed up and accessible, so when I'm gone they won't be lost to my family. With young grandchildren it's possible to photograph them with manual film cameras that don't autofocus, but it's a challenge, so there the phone wins for now. But my heart belongs to film, and to making decisions about how you want the image to look before you press the shutter release, not afterwards. It is a process which requires you to take an active part in it, not a passive exercise controlled by a computer.
I used to have a darkroom, but these days I use a lab to process and print my films. In particular I use Harman, which is a UK film manufacturer which makes a wide range of both black and white and colour films in various formats, not just in 35mm and 120 medium format sizes, but various sizes of sheet film too. Their lab is top-notch, and I also get them to provide low resolution scans (about as good as my 2003 Canon Digital Ixus) as well as prints. It's not cheap, but I don't take so many photos that it's an issue.
This whole approach brings the additional benefit of delayed gratification. I just sent off one black and white and one colour film from my recent holiday, and I don't expect to receive the prints for over a week, perhaps 10 days. This is to be expected and it contributes to the mindful nature of the experience. If I wanted instant results, I wouldn't be taking photos in this way. Come to think of it, I have a couple of Fuji Instax instant cameras which would give me prints in about a minute, so perhaps I'll get some film for those soon.
[1] I was stopped by the police in central London when using this camera in 2009. I had a little photographic project to shoot some scenes on Kodachrome slide film before it was discontinued, replicating similar ones from the 1960s by Charles Cushman. Apparently a CCTV operator thought I was behaving suspiciously and reported me. I explained to the nice police people that I couldn't show them the photos I'd taken because it was Kodachrome and by then the only place still processing it was the Kodak plant in Parsons, Kansas. One of them had studied criminology at the college in Parsons, Kansas, and if that doesn't meet the criteria for 'you couldn't make it up' then I don't know what does.
http://purl.dlib.indiana.edu/iudl/archives/cushman/P12427
Email: kdan01 [at] posteo [dot] net