A couple of weeks ago, I took part in a Fab Collective project which saw us ditch our cutting edge digital photography equipment and arm ourselves with just a disposable film camera each.  Our mission was to go out within a 1-mile radius of our starting location and to simply shoot with the disposables within a 2-hour window.

Until then, I had not shot any film since 2002 when I sold up all of my film cameras.  Actually, that’s not quite true, I still have an APS film camera and little Polaroid Fisher Price thing lying around somewhere, but they’ve not been used since around the same time.

So, there I was.  Not only was I wondering around the streets of Liverpool shooting film on a cartoon emblazoned camera which had cost me the princely sum of £1, but I was also having fun.  Not the same kind of fun I used to have when I last shot film 7 years ago.  This was different.  Not only am I a different photographer from when I was back then, but I’d become so entrenched in the digital way of life I was still checking for the LCD review after the first few plastic, hollow shutter releases.

There’s something very liberating about shooting a camera which has no means of focusing apart from physically moving it within the suggested shooting zone of 1-3m, no means of adjusting the exposure apart from switching on the built-in flash, and no means of knowing whether or not you’d just ‘got the shot’ without dousing it with chemicals.  Heck, I didn’t even know what ISO the film was.

Being used to shooting in low light conditions and allowing auto-ISO to ramp things up for me, I avoided using the flash even in a dimly lit church.  The result was some photographs of bright white window shapes surrounded by very dark grain.  Not quite the serene scene I’d pictured in my mind, but it did make me smile at a time when digital would have had me reaching for the ISO button.

Technically, the photographs I took weren’t the greatest I’d ever shot, but there was an organic, almost unpredictable quality to them that’s so different from the precise, binary world of digital I was used to.  I had to have more.

I’d toyed with the idea of medium format before, after playing with some of the cameras owned by other Fab Collective members, but in the end I’d decided I didn’t want to invest in a whole new system.  So, I decided to get myself a used film body with which I could use my existing Nikon lenses with.  After a bit of research and deliberation, I started fishing on eBay and landed myself a Nikon FM2n; a fully manual camera which would even continue to work without any power source.  I’d decided I wanted to branch off away from the world of digital and auto-focus, back to something which was essentially the same as my first ever SLR; the Minolta SRT-101b.

Holding the FM2n up to my eye was like going back to the place I’d not been to for a long, long time.  It was good.  I’ve shot about half-a-dozen frames of XP2 so far and have no idea whether any of them are sharp or well exposed, but that doesn’t matter so much right now.  For now, I’m taking photographs.