I found the camera at the back of a cupboard while looking for something else entirely, which is how most of the good things get found. An old manual SLR, a 50mm lens, and a half-finished roll of film still inside it. I have no idea what is on the first twenty frames. I am almost afraid to develop it.
The last year has been a lot of screen. Work is a screen, the news is a screen, even the way we have all stayed in touch with people has been a screen. I had not noticed how much I missed an activity that had nothing plugged into it and no notification attached, until I was standing in the garden trying to remember how to meter for shade without a phone telling me the answer.
Film is gloriously unforgiving in a way that turns out to be the whole appeal. You get thirty-six frames. There is no chimping at the back of the camera, no burst of two hundred near-identical shots to sift later. You look, you decide, you commit, and then you wait days to find out whether you got it. Half of mine are wrong. The exposure is off, or the focus drifted, or I simply misjudged the moment. The ones that work feel earned in a way a digital frame somehow never quite does.
What I have actually rediscovered is not photography. It is the value of a hobby that is finite and a little bit slow. Something with an end to the roll, a cost per frame that makes you think, and a result you cannot summon instantly. It pulls you out of the infinite-scroll headspace that the rest of life now lives in. So the camera is back on the shelf by the door rather than the back of the cupboard, the half-finished roll is going to the lab next week, and I have ordered three more. Whatever is on those first twenty frames, I rather like that I have to wait to find out.