I've always loved Photography. Growling up, all I wanted to do was steal my father's camera (A Kodak Pony) which felt way more like a real camera than the 110 film thing I was using. Of course, when I did get to use the Pony, I learned how hard it was to use a camera which didn't have a focusing aid in the viewfinder.
In High School a cancele Russian course got my into the photography class and a real darkroom for the first time in my life. The smell of the chemicals, the process that turned blank nothing into a image - even better an image I took. It still amazes me. That class yet to layout and design, to newspapers and yearbooks, and into college as a writer.
In college, as a writer, I didn't have to take my own pictures. I had to choose, and in the end I chose writing. I don't regret that, I love writing and will never stop, but I missed capturing images. I got a digital camera, I traveled, I wrote.
One summer, cleaning out an attic, I found my old film cameras. Well, mine (a Minolta X370), the camera my father used until his death in 2007 (A Pentax K1000), and that old Pony. The Minolta and Pentax even still had film. Shooting the rest of those rolls, the shuttle snap and the feel of advancing the film, and I was hooked.
We live in a digital world. We have digital phones, digital lives, but we are not digital people. We take notes on paper (if we want to remember them better, anyway), and the best selling presets to modify digital images are just trying to duplicate the look of film. So, don't fake it. Shoot film. Embrace the analog.