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Peregrination

I have been on a bit of a technology peregrination over the past few years from film to digital then back to film then a return to digital and now home to film again with a few trips, sidesteps, stumbles, diversions and blind alleys along the way. All getting in the way of the simple practice of photography.

You begin to realise on this long, meandering, technological footslog that there is a purity to film photography, a calming simplicity, a freedom from the tyranny of operational complexities and a tangible touch to the medium you are working with that makes everything much more "real".

Thus, finally, I have concluded that as I have no interest in video, am fed up of paying for more and more for complex video features I never use, I am in fact a stills photographer in the old classic sense of the term and that being case what the dickens am I doing messing about trying to work round all the complexities of this digital tech fighting it to try and make it work as close as possible to an iconic stills rangefinder camera as I could and trying to get that old film look? Dumb or what?

 

Things had got so bad I had even considered forking out an exorbitant sum of money for a digital rangefinder camera (an M10-R) with no video capabilities in it, as it is designed specifically for us stills photogs, when my brain took over (finally) and said, "Enough is enough".

 

If I wanted a camera for classic stills photography that was easy to use with minimum of controls and no complex menus, touch screens, joys sticks, custom modes, programmable function buttons, multiple dials and switches and lots of post processing then what I wanted was a film camera. Indeed one of my existing film cameras using er... film. Doh!