I found my dad's old camera in a box while clearing the loft, an Olympus OM-2 with a lens that still focuses smoothly fifteen years after anyone last touched it. I put a roll through it expecting to confirm it was dead. It wasn't, and now my weekends have quietly rearranged themselves around it.
The thing I'd forgotten about film is the friction. Thirty-six frames, no screen on the back, no second chance. Every shot costs something, both the film and the developing, and that cost changes how you behave. I stopped spraying and started looking. I'd stand somewhere for a full minute before deciding a frame wasn't worth it and walking on. After a decade of phones that take twelve photos before you've finished pressing the button, being forced to commit felt almost rude, and then it felt wonderful.
It maps onto work in a way I didn't expect. So much of what I do is built around making the cost of an action approach zero: cheap to deploy, cheap to roll back, cheap to retry. That's mostly good. But there's a quiet cost to costlessness, which is that you stop thinking before you act, because thinking is now the expensive part. The camera reintroduces a deliberate friction and the friction does the thinking for you, or at least insists that you do it.
I sent the first three rolls to a lab because I'm not yet brave enough for chemistry on the kitchen table, though I can feel that decision coming. The waiting is part of it too. You shoot a roll, you forget what's on it, and a week later an envelope arrives full of small surprises, some of them good. There's a version of me that would optimise all of that away. I'm choosing, this once, to leave it slow.