Photography as a hobby has been new to me for around 18 months – I never used to be a person who took a lot of photos nor have photos taken of me – snapshot memories on my phone with the occasional intentional composition was the extent of my interest. However, pleasing results from a friend experimenting with film photography influenced me to also give it a go. A browse of Facebook marketplace had me driving locally to pick up the passed down camera of an enthusiast, and for £20 I was the new owner of a Minolta 7000 AF. For half that cost again, in film and AA batteries, I was up and running and away taking photos!

Ultimately I didn’t actually finish this first roll of film until over a year later – a marketplace addiction coupled with early-onset GAS had me buying a Ricoh XR-2 and putting a roll of colour film through that. Luckily, the Ricoh camera I’d bought was well looked after and through good luck I was saved any of the typical troubles of second-hand film cameras. I went out with this camera with the intention to get through my initial roll quickly so I could see the results; in the end my first foray into photography and first developed roll of film went well – I got all 36 exposures back near enough exposed correctly. I’ve included a few images from that first developed roll: the backstreet with bicycles, the bookshop, the double exposure with lights, and a photo of my girlfriend.

Film photography seemed to be a relatively cheap buy-in for ‘decent’ results – up to this point I had probably spent around £70 on some cameras, some film, and mail-in development – but I quickly realised it would get expensive. Buying a single roll of film and sending it off for dev&scan worked out to be around £1 per photo and much too expensive for someone who now wanted to go out and just press the shutter button. It turns out there is only so much joy you can get winding on the shutter and clicking away at nothing. Starting out with an SLR film camera had me enjoying the differences between it and my phone: the tactile feel, the aesthetics, and ultimately the end product – the colour and non-HDR look of a film photo. I would have liked to continue with this SLR as my main camera, but it was clear outside of the initial buy-in that a switch to digital would be cheaper and allow me to take more photos in the short-term. So that’s what I set out to do.

Google searches, YouTube videos, Reddit posts: they all pointed to Fujifilm as a ‘digital replacement’ for film shooting. A year later I know now that’s not really true, but it did point me in the direction of a camera system that I am still using and enjoying today. So another lucky marketplace deal later made me the owner of a Fujifilm X-T20 and the XF 18-55mm kit lens. It proved to be a fancy camera and helped replicate a lot of the enjoyment I had from my SLR. I resolved to take it with me always and often; to pack it in my bag and try and take a photo at any opportunity – on a walk, with family, out climbing. The film simulations and recipes let me take the camera out to just frame and shoot. The rest of those initial photos in this blog post with are taken early days with this X-T20: the magnolia tree, the sunset walk, and the swan in the river.

These first handful of photos and more pleased me in some way and they represent the basis of what I’ve enjoyed about photography so far: presenting an interesting way to see the things I’ve seen and to capture them in some way that makes me want to look again and remember the day I took that photo. In the year that followed I’ve taken some thousands of photos, learned a lot, and come to understand a bit more of what I enjoy and want out of photography. By chance or by intention, I enjoy taking a photo. However, I still want my photography to improve and I want to continue with film photography and to take it further. In that spirit I have created this space to document and refer back to my thoughts and experiences with photography and use it to be better.

A short piece long overdue. I’ll end this first post with some more photos from a recent trip and a promise of more to come.