A Love Letter to My Film Cameras

I sold my Mamiya 645AFD, and I regret it every time I think about it, which is more often than I would like to admit. The film got too expensive, and the scanning costs added up, and I told myself the rational thing to do was to let it go and put the money toward something more practical. I was right about the math. I was wrong about everything else. 

A few years later, the absence of that camera is still something I notice, and no amount of sensible reasoning about cost per frame has made the regret any smaller.

So this is a love letter written partly in real time to a camera I still own, the Rollei 35, and partly in retrospect to a camera I used to own and should not have parted with. The two of them represent the film half of my photographic life, the half that lives outside the digital workflows I use for paid work, and the half that I think about more than I think about any of my current cameras combined. That is probably a failure of discipline on my part. It is also a fact, and I might as well write about it honestly.

The Mamiya 645AFD

I bought the Mamiya because I wanted to shoot 645 film and I was a novice at medium format. Autofocus was not a compromise for me. It was the whole point. I did not want to fight the camera while I was learning what medium format actually felt like, and the 645AFD let me get out of my own way while I figured out everything else about the format.

The camera felt rugged in my hands, in the way that professional gear from the early 2000s was rugged. It was built out of materials that assumed the body would be used for real work by people who did not baby their equipment. The grip filled my palm. The controls sat under my fingers where they belonged. Picking it up felt like picking up something that was meant to be used, not something that was meant to be photographed for a review. The weight distribution was correct. The materials had the right friction. Everything about the physical experience of the camera said "working tool" in a way that modern cameras, with their plastic-feeling grips and featherweight construction, rarely manage.

And then there was the mirror. The 645AFD had a kerchunk that I have not heard from any other camera I have owned, before or since. It was not a click. It was a full mechanical event, a deep thump that filled the room and made the subject flinch slightly the first time and settle into it by the third. The mirror slap alone changed how portrait sessions felt. You could not ignore that the camera was working. You could not pretend the shutter was a digital abstraction. It was a real physical thing happening between you and the person across from you, and everyone in the room knew when a frame had been made.

I sent my film out for development, and the mail-back envelopes arriving on my porch a week or two after a shoot became one of the best parts of shooting medium format. There was a specific joy in that moment that digital workflows have never replicated for me. The anticipation between the shoot and the delivery. The envelope in the mailbox. The careful slitting open of it at the kitchen table. The first look at the negatives and scans, frames I had shot a week or two earlier and half-forgotten, and the surprise of recognizing what I had captured. Some of them were better than I remembered. Some were worse. All of them felt like a gift from my past self, sent forward to a present-day me who had already moved on to other things. Digital has given me a lot, but it has never given me that specific moment of discovery, of sitting at the table and meeting my week-old work as if for the first time.

I shot the Mamiya almost exclusively for portraits. The ritual of the session was different from any digital shoot I have ever done. The subject sat. I set up the camera. I loaded a roll of whatever I had that week. The person on the other side of the lens understood that this was taking longer than they expected, and they settled into the slowness of it. The frames I got back were heavier and more present than the best digital frames I have ever made. I am not going to pretend I can explain exactly why. I just know it was true, and the evidence is sitting in a binder of 645 negatives that I go back to more often than I go back to my recent digital catalogs.

Selling the camera was a rational decision. Every month I was not shooting it, the value of owning it dropped a little. Every time I priced a roll of 120 Portra and saw what the cost had become, the math got worse. I listed the camera on eBay and sold it, feeling like an adult. That adult feeling lasted about six months before the regret set in, and the regret has not gone anywhere since. If you are reading this and you are considering selling your film camera because the economics have gotten hard, I am not going to tell you what to do. I am going to tell you that the math is not the whole picture, and the regret is real, and you will feel it long after the money you recovered has been spent on something forgettable.

The Rollei 35

The Rollei came to me for a different reason entirely. It is a beautiful camera. That is the truth I am not going to dress up with a more respectable justification. The team at Rollei designed one of the most elegant industrial objects of the twentieth century, and I wanted to own one, and I bought one, and I have never once regretted the purchase.

It is also an unusual camera to shoot. The lens collapses into the body to make the camera genuinely pocketable, and you have to remember to extend it before you take a picture, which I have forgotten more than once with predictable results. The focus is zone-based, which means you guess the distance and set it manually on a scale. The meter is external and requires you to think about exposure rather than have the camera decide for you. None of this is efficient. All of it is part of why I love the camera.

The Rollei has been to Paris with me and to New York with me, and it has shot things in both cities that I would never have photographed with a larger camera. The most recent time I used it in Paris, I caught a stray dog on the street. The dog did not know or care that I was there, which is exactly what the Rollei lets you do. It disappears into the texture of the day. Strangers do not notice it the way they notice a modern full frame body, though it shoots the same size film. The photograph I got of the dog was not technically remarkable. It was just what the camera is for, which is being with me in a place and ready to make a picture when one happens to be worth making.

The Rollei has also been on trips where I did not make a single frame worth keeping, and I am not sure that matters. The camera being with me changed how I walked through those cities. I looked at things differently because I was carrying something capable of capturing them. That is not the same as making the photograph, but it is not nothing, either. Some cameras make you a better walker through the world, and the Rollei is one of them.

What These Cameras Represent

There is a 1990s style of photography, or an approach really, that I have been trying to find my way back to since I started shooting seriously. It is the mode where the photographer is an artist rather than a technician, where the camera is a tool in service of an eye rather than a platform to be managed. I came up on the tail end of film. I was born in 1987, and by the time I was making my first deliberate photographs as a teenager, digital was already winning, but film was still what serious photography looked like. The aesthetic vocabulary I absorbed, the sense of what a photograph was supposed to feel like, was a film aesthetic even when I was shooting digital to make it. Maybe most importantly, the experience of photography, for me, was learned with film. 

Let me be honest about something here, because I can already hear the comments. You can absolutely be an artist with a digital camera. There are plenty of working photographers making deeply felt, genuinely artistic work on Sony and Canon and Fujifilm bodies, and anyone arguing otherwise is telling on themselves. The problem is not digital. The problem, if there is one, is me. I have a specific weakness in how I relate to my digital cameras, and it pulls me steadily toward the technician end of the spectrum even when I do not want to go there. I spend more time thinking about autofocus modes, color profiles, and file management than I do thinking about what I am actually looking at. I know photographers who do not have this problem. I am not one of them.

These two film cameras do something about that weakness. The Mamiya slowed me down because every frame cost real money and because the mirror slap made a commitment sound that the silent electronic shutter of a modern body does not. The Rollei slows me down because every operation requires a decision I would not otherwise have to make. Both of them put me back into a mode of photography where I am thinking about the picture rather than managing the camera, and that is a place I want to visit more often than my working life allows.

Why One Stays and Why I Want the Other Back

The Rollei is not going anywhere. It has a permanent spot in my life even though it does not appear on a single invoice I have ever sent. It is the camera that reminds me why I wanted to be a photographer in the first place. That sounds grandiose when I write it down, but I am telling the truth.

The Mamiya is the one I want back. Not a different medium format camera. Not a Hasselblad 500 or a Pentax 67 or any of the bodies I have convinced myself I would love just as much. The 645AFD, specifically, with its weight and its autofocus and its kerchunk and its palm-sized negatives. I am aware that wanting a specific discontinued camera back after selling it is not a rational position. I do not care. Rational decisions got me to sell the camera in the first place, and rational decisions have not helped me feel better about having done it.

I do not shoot film for paying work. The turnaround is too slow, the costs are too high, and the clients do not know or care whether their images came off a sensor or a strip of acetate. My paying work is digital, and it will stay digital for the foreseeable future. That is not a complaint. That is the life I have chosen and the life I want to be living.

But there is a category of shoot that does not have a deliverable, that does not have a client, that exists purely because I want to make a picture and see what comes of it. For that category, the cameras I want are the Rollei and a 645AFD that I do not currently own. The Rollei I have. When I find a Mamiya in good condition at a price I can justify, I will buy it, and I will not make the mistake of letting it go again.

If you are reading this and you are thinking about a film camera you used to own, you probably already know whether the regret is real or whether you are just feeling nostalgic about a camera that was not actually that important to you. If it is real, let me save you some time: the regret will not go away on its own. You can wait for it to fade, or you can go find another one of the cameras you miss. I am going with the second option. The adult in me knows this is probably not a rational choice. The photographer in me does not particularly care.

Lead image Lëa-Kim Châteauneuf, CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rollei_35_S_-_side.jpg), via Wikimedia Commons.