Let's start with this immense amount of waffle.

I've always been enthusiastic about taking pictures, for years using film, then using digital cameras when they became quite good and affordable.

I (like many people who also take pictures for business or pleasure) switched over completely to digital cameras, and with good reason. There are many indisputable reasons to work with digital cameras rather than the old analogue film cameras, especially if your income is dependant on your workflow.

Over time though, I lost interest in photography and it has taken me some time to realise that I didn't really find digital photography much fun, or to be honest, satisfying.

Digital cameras, especially the now very good ones being built into smart phones, are everywhere. Virtually everybody has become a photographer and if you go out anywhere remotely interesting now, there will be a ton of people there already doing exactly the same thing, snapping away picture after picture. If they are anything like I was, they will quite probably never look at any of them ever again.

Taking Photographs can be Fun

Way back, in my late teens, I was a broke university student. My first "proper" camera came from a photography shop close to home, that was offering money off new cameras by trading in an old one. Getting a new camera was never going to be an option so I asked if they'd sell me one of the rough old trade-in ones that had been left by people going somewhere higher up in the world.

The worst trade-in camera they had in they didn't even want to sell until I agreed to waive the warrantee. It was an unbranded clone type 35mm SLR from either the Soviet Union or China (there were no words on it to tell), with a broken light meter, dusty viewfinder, clunky mechanisms and the matching no-name 50mm lens on it was dubious at best. But I got it for almost free and that's what counted.

My sister was attending a nearby art college and this gave access to cheap subsidised film. It came on a big roll and didn't seem to carry any brand - marked only as black and white ISO400. She had to load it manually into little 35mm canisters in the shop (by feel only, in a dark-bag) before dropping a few off at my flat when she next passed.

I'd go out with this camera and see what I could get. I used a photocopy of a suggested-exposures sheet to get the aperture and shutter speed roughly right (the price of a proper light meter making it out of my reach). I'd then come back and develop the film at home in a washing/fixing tank I'd acquired cheap off the Internet.

I enjoyed the whole process from beginning to end, and then enjoyed looking at the pictures I had captured. They had taken some effort and thought, and because of this I treasured them. I had to look at what I wanted to photograph, and decide if the shot was really going to be worth a valuable frame of film. I then had to spend some time thinking about the angle, the composition, how I wanted the focus, the light. And whether I wanted people in it, or whether I had to wait for the scene to be momentarily empty. I'd then set the exposure to the best of by ability and judgement, and snap! Assuming I didn't mess up the developing, I would be able to see the results in a day or two.

The pictures were no works of art by any means, but that didn't matter to me. I was having fun and when the end result really worked I felt proud and a sense of accomplishment.

I can only speak for myself, as I know plenty of people who do not feel the same way, but taking pictures on a modern digital camera rarely gives me anything like the sense of achievement that working with low tech cameras and monochrome film did.

To use a digital camera, look at a subject and be able to take hundreds of shots without cost from as many angles as you can find the energy to walk around, metered automatically by precise muti-spot sensors then bracketed seven stops in either direction for good measure, focused using face and scene recognition then have the captured images filtered through an on-board CPU many times more powerful than the computer that put men on the moon, and be able to see the result as it happens - does certainly yield extremely good images. And if it's all about results - that's the way forward. But I find, for me, it takes a lot of the fun out of photography and I find it harder to be pleased with the result when I feel that the camera did most of the work for me. The digital camera unquestionably does a better job and makes better decisions than I can, and takes better pictures, but I don't feel that it's all my work then.

I also rather like the imperfections that come in to monochrome film photography. Or at least, with my pictures! The exposure is rarely spot on, the old lenses distort sometimes in the corners. The contrast can be a little unusual and of course there is no colour. Often there is some dust or light flares making their presence known. These old cameras just capture the world in a different way, and you never even really know what they've got until the negatives come back from the lab.