Sorting out the spare room over the holidays, I found my old film camera at the bottom of a box, wrapped in a jumper I'd been looking for since about 2014. An Olympus OM, fully mechanical, the kind that needs a battery only for the light meter and will happily fire without one. I'd put it down years ago when phone cameras got good enough that carrying anything else felt like an affectation.
I put a roll through it on a grey walk last week, and I'd forgotten how completely different it makes you behave.
the constraints are the feature
Thirty-six frames. No screen to check. No deleting the bad one and trying again. You compose, you decide it's worth a frame, you commit, and then you don't see the result for a fortnight. Everything about it is the opposite of how I take pictures on my phone, where I'll fire twenty near-identical shots and sort it out later, except I never sort it out later, so I have a camera roll with eleven thousand photos and no memories in particular.
With thirty-six frames you slow down. You actually look at the light. You ask whether this is a photograph or just a thing you're pointing at. Most of the time the honest answer is the latter and you lower the camera, which is its own small pleasure. By the end of the roll I'd taken maybe a dozen frames I genuinely cared about, which is about a dozen more than a typical phone-camera afternoon leaves me with.
why this keeps happening to me
I notice I'm drawn to the same thing in tools at work. The systems I enjoy most are the ones with a hard constraint that forces a decision: a fixed memory budget, a request timeout you can't exceed, an interface so small there's only one obvious way to use it. Constraints do your deciding for you, and deciding is the tiring part.
The film camera is just that idea in a leather case. It refuses to let me defer the choice. I can't shoot now and think later, the medium won't allow it, so I think now. That turns out to be exactly the thing the convenient tools quietly removed, and exactly the thing I'd been missing without being able to name it.
I'll get the roll developed next week. Some of it will be rubbish, because I'm out of practice and the meter's a stop optimistic in the cold. But I'll have looked properly at a grey January afternoon for the first time in years, and there's a print at the end of it rather than another file I'll never open. Worth digging through the jumper for.