There is a particular kind of guilt that comes from having a hobby you used to be good at and have not touched in years. The gear is still in the cupboard. You can see the box every time you reach for the hoover. And every time you see it you think, I should get back into that, and then you close the cupboard and forget about it for another nine months.
For me the box held a camera. A proper one, with dials and a strap that smells faintly of the last decade. I bought it second hand when I was at university, shot a lot of frankly terrible photographs with it, got slightly better, and then somewhere around the point where my actual job got busy I stopped. Not a decision, exactly. More a slow tide going out. The phone in my pocket took perfectly adequate pictures, the camera needed batteries I never had, and the whole thing quietly became a museum piece.
This summer I got it out again. I want to talk about why, because I think the reason is more interesting than the camera.
hobbies are not side projects
Somewhere in the last few years I started treating everything I did outside work like work. The home network became a project with a roadmap. The garden became a backlog. Reading became a list with a target. I was optimising my leisure, which is about the most joyless sentence I have ever written and I have written a lot of joyless sentences in incident reviews.
The tell was that I had stopped doing anything that did not produce an artefact. If a Saturday did not end with a thing I could point at, a commit, a tidied shelf, a finished book I could log, it felt wasted. That is a miserable way to live, and I did not notice I was living it until I picked up the camera and realised I had no idea what the deliverable was supposed to be.
There isn't one. That is the whole point. You go for a walk, you look at things, occasionally you press a button. Most of the photographs are bad. A few are fine. Once in a while one is genuinely good and you have no idea why, and you cannot reproduce it, and that is allowed.
the friction was the feature
I had a choice when I started again. Buy something modern, mirrorless, autofocus that locks on faster than I can think, or stick with the old manual body. I went with the old body, partly out of cheapness and partly out of stubbornness, and it turned out to be the right call for reasons I did not expect.
The thing about a camera with no automation is that it makes you slow down. You set the aperture. You set the shutter. You actually look at the light and make a decision and own the result. With the phone I take forty near identical pictures and keep none of them. With the old camera I take six and think about each one, because thinking is the only feature it has.
This is the same lesson I keep relearning at work, oddly. Friction is not always the enemy. Sometimes the thing that slows you down is the thing that makes you pay attention. A code review that takes a beat. A deploy that asks "are you sure". A manual step you have deliberately not automated because the automation would let you stop thinking about whether you should. I spend a lot of my professional life removing friction. It was useful to be reminded that not all of it deserves removing.
I am not going to pretend I shot film, by the way. I started on the digital body because film developing near me is both expensive and slow, and I did not want the cost of failure to be high enough that I stopped again. That is a deliberate choice. Low stakes are how you keep going. The romantic version where I lovingly develop negatives in a blacked out bathroom can wait until I have actually rebuilt the habit.
the first walk back
The first proper outing was a grey Tuesday afternoon, which is the most British possible day for this, and I came back with about thirty frames. Most were unremarkable. There was one of a wet pavement with the light doing something I cannot describe and absolutely did not plan, and I have been quietly pleased about it for a week.
What surprised me most was how it felt afterwards. Not productive. Not like I had ticked anything off. Just clearer, in the way a long walk makes you clearer, except I had also been paying close attention to the world for two hours instead of thinking about a half finished migration.
what I would tell past me
If you have a box in a cupboard, this is the bit for you.
- Pick the lowest stakes version of the thing. Cheap, near to hand, no big purchase to justify. The barrier is starting, not equipment.
- Do not set a target. The moment it has a metric it becomes work and you already have a job.
- Accept that you will be bad at it again for a while. The muscle atrophied. That is fine and temporary.
- Let it produce nothing. A hobby that earns its keep is just a second job with worse pay.
I do not think I had a problem, exactly. I had drifted into treating rest as something to be efficient at, and the camera was the thing that pointed it out. Worth the price of admission, which in this case was a set of batteries and a grey Tuesday.
The box is back in the cupboard, but now it is in the front. That seems like the right place for it.