I recently acquired a manual focus film camera from the early 1980s and it is the most exciting piece of technology I have purchased in several years. I bought it for a variety of reasons, ranging from nostalgia -- I am old enough to have shot film longer than I have digital -- to the simple fact that it was so cheap -- camera and a well worn, though optically fine, 50mm f/1.4 lens were $99 shipped to my door. Another $100 worth of Velvia and I was ready to go.

I know what you're thinking, this is going to be some piece about how film has physicality and digital is too ephemeral and we should all hold hands and sing kumbayah together with our various full hipster, full mechanical archaic camera's around our necks. 

But no. It's not like that. 

The first few rolls of film I shot with my new $99 wonder were absolute rubbish. 

So were the next two after that. So I shoved the thing to the back corner of my desk and went off to review the very shiny Yi M1. After I packed the M1 in the box and shipped it off I went back to the film and forced myself to wade through the crap.

It was immediately obvious that I had forgotten how to compose a scene, forgotten how to meter a scene in my head, forgotten even how to focus for christsakes. I had produced crap because I had forgotten all the fundamentals. With digital it's easy to not worry too much about composition because you can just keep shooting, look at the results and tweak your composition a bit and shoot again. The same is true of exposure, perhaps moreso give how much you can tweak exposure after the fact in a good RAW editor. I mean I know you still do it the old fashioned way with care and attention every time you delicately push the shutter, but me I tend to just point and mash that thing 20 times and sort out the results in post. 

In film none of that works. Unless you're fantastically rich, or it's a heck of a scene, you aren't going to shoot more than one or two exposures of any scene, which means you have to have your exposure dialed in ahead of time and the scene composed the way you want it. You have to spend more time thinking when you shoot film. I had forgotten how to think like a film camera.

So I went to the library and checked out an incredible old, worn and faded copy of John Hedgecoe's Complete Photography Course and reread it cover to cover. I pretended like I was back in college, I took notes, I wrote out exposure formulas. One night I had an anxiety dream in which my old college photography teacher scolded me for considering a crop: "The image is made out there, not in here" she used to say. 

The next day I pulled Martin Parr's Small World off the shelf and spent the afternoon pondering why it is that we seem to want photography to be so serious when in fact it seem to not really want that. I reread my Galen Rowell books and thought, well, maybe it is serious.

All the while I didn't take any film pictures. I did however start taking a lot more digital shots. I dusted off my old GF1 and slapped the Panasonic 20mm lens on the front. What it lacks in resolution it makes up for in portability. I don't know why I like the GF1 so much, but I do. I've yet to find a digital camera that I enjoy quite as much (save perhaps the Fuji XPro 2). 

The more I shot digital the more I realized that it wasn't the film I missed. The digital medium is fine with me -- both have their pros and cons. No, what I missed was the manual focus and the shutter ring. I missed the mechanics of photography that, silly though it sounds to write this, seem to somehow pull me into the experience in a way that just doesn't happen with autofocus lenses and A mode and a dial to turn. Now if you'll just join hands with the person next to you and we can start singing.

And yes, I know you can manual focus even with my old GF1. It's not a great experience though. I've never used a m4/3 lens that was any fun at all to manual focus and there are all too few lens these days with nice mechanical, clicky aperture wheels. Step up to full frame from Nikon or Canon and there are plenty of lenses with nice satisfying clicks and buttery smooth focus wheels but most of them are older. 

In fact, I realized that I didn't care at all about the camera. I never had, except for a brief flirtation with an utterly amazing Toyo 4x5. Holy shit that was a camera. That I could never afford. No screw cameras, they're expensive, lose value the minute you buy them and all more or less do the same thing. And they're all pretty good these days. Just buy one you can afford and move on to what matters, what's always been the only thing that mattered: the lens. 

I ended up keeping the film camera. I've remembered a few things, my percentage of keepers is slowly creeping back up. But for me the big takeaway was not the transformative power of film, but the return to manual focus lenses. I'm not alone. Forums and blogs about manual focus abound. And the best part is that most people don't want theses lenses, which means there are some really fantastic lenses out there for next to nothing. A Tokina AT-X 2.5/90 Macro, probably the sharpest lens I've ever used, for less than $400? Yes please. Or grab my favorite "normal" lens, the Minolta MC Rokkor-PG 58mm F1.2 for about $350. 

Thanks to an abundance of adapters you can use these on virtually any mirrorless camera out there. I plan to invest in full frame mirrorless because I want to use them at their intended focal length, but they'll work on an APS-C or even micro four thirds camera, you'll just be using them at 1.5x and 2x their origial focal length. So the Tokina attached to say a Sony A7ii is a 90mm lens, slap it on a Fuji X-E2 and it becomes a 120mm equivalent. And on the GF1 it would be a 180mm equivalent.

No matter which digital camera you chose you'll end up with, to my mind anyway, the best of both worlds, the conveniece, cost savings and tremendous post processing power of digital and the solidly built, smooth focusing aperture clicking mechanics of manual focus lenses.