I always liked taking photos, but my journey with analog photography started with a friend of mine, Francesco, that found an old analog camera (a Pentax Spotmatic F) in his grandparent’s basement.
He showed me the camera and tried to take some pics with analog film, it seemed like magic to me, and I absolutely wanted to explore this world, so I bought an analog camera as well (Yashica Fx3-Super 2000) from an old photographer in Rome and started taking some pictures.
At the beginning it was a bit frustrating, with analog photography you lose all the automatic focus and exposure features, so many pictures were too dark, too light, out of focus or blurry… meh.
But still, I could feel something different… the feeling of impatience and curiosity when you want to know how a picture will turn out was something new to me. You know, with smartphones and digital cameras we usually see the results as soon as we take the picture, but with analog cameras you have to wait: you need to finish the entire film roll before developing it and scan or print your frames.
The way we take pictures today is istantaneous, we have a virtually unlimited number of retries if you don’t like the picture you just made. On the other hand, with film you have only 24 or 36 frames and it will cost you money: A film roll can cost 5 to 20 dollars (it depends on wich type of roll you buy), so you are forced to think, consider and analize a shot before pushing the button on your camera, this will eventually bring you to take photos only for the moments, places and people you really enjoy being in/at/with.
If you fall in love with this mindset, you will never turn back to digital again.
Plus, analog cameras works without batteries! It’s just a bunch of springs and gears, so you can take pictures without worrying about it :)
Finally, with digital cameras you need to consider external SD’s, dedicated HDD to sore your photos and backups. If your HDD fails… well… you guessed it. The analog approach works in a way that if you lose your digital scans you always have your prints, and if you lose your prints you always have your negatives.
I started uploading my pictures on Flickr but later i began adding them to my Instagram also, feel free to take a look!
Here you are some of my favourite pics:
