I started shooting because a high school class required a camera and I didn't have one, which is a less romantic origin story than most photographers give you but probably the truest one. The camera I bought with my own money was a Canon PowerShot A580, a plastic point-and-shoot with none of the qualities anyone associates with a serious tool, and I used it because it was what I could afford, not because I loved it yet. That came later, and it came sideways, the way most real obsessions do.
The Canon lasted exactly as long as it took me to understand what I was missing, which is when I picked up a used Nikon D70s and ran it until there was nothing left to run. I shot with that camera the way you'd wear a single pair of boots into the ground, no ceremony about it, just use until failure. Then came my first workhorse, the D7100.
Somewhere in that stretch I started paying attention to lenses, which is the moment every photographer's bank account starts quietly dying, and somewhere after that I discovered film, which is the moment it dies loudly. Film photography is not a hobby, it's a leak. Money for cameras, money for stock, money for development, money for cameras you didn't need but wanted because they were beautiful mechanical objects with a history attached to them, and before long I wasn't just shooting film, I was collecting the machines that made it, studying their internals, their lineage, the decade-by-decade evolution of a technology that peaked before I was old enough to buy it new -
I liked the pictures. I liked the objects more, maybe, or at least equally, which is its own kind of tell. What I was really chasing, without having a word for it yet, was the fact that every one of those machines had a personality baked into its flaws, a light leak here, a soft corner there, a specific way of rendering skin or blowing highlights that no two bodies did quite the same. The imperfection wasn't a bug I was tolerating. It was the whole point.
Eventually the hobby became a job, one of roughly thirty creative roles I've cycled through in a career that resists a clean job title, and the job meant professional gear, for photo and increasingly for video too. This is where the story usually turns upward, more skill, more clients, more capability, and for a while it did. Then it turned. I can point to the exact hinge: I went from a Fuji X-T3 to a Sony A7III, a technically correct upgrade in every spec that matters, and something in me broke on the way. The more resolution and dynamic range and computational cleverness got packed into the body, the less I felt anything holding the camera. Work slowed too, which didn't help, but the bigger wound was aesthetic, not economic. I stopped knowing which bag the A7III lived in. Not because I'd stopped shooting. Because the images it made looked like plastic, correct and lifeless, and I couldn't locate the version of me that used to care. A camera that corrects for everything ends up saying nothing on its own. All the character I'd spent years chasing in old mechanical bodies had been engineered out in the name of accuracy, and accuracy, it turns out, isn't a point of view.
What survived was smaller and older. My X100 never left my side through any of this, the one camera I never had to talk myself back into loving, and it's still the closest thing I have to a permanent creative partner, mechanical enough to still feel like mine even with a sensor inside it. And what's pulled me back into the rest of it wasn't better gear, it was worse gear, deliberately: a Game Boy Camera, a Casio wristwatch camera, tools built with resolutions measured in the low thousands and interfaces that seem actively hostile to the idea of getting the photo off the device and onto a screen. I still haven't solved how to pull images off the watch. The Game Boy Camera is, charitably, impractical. None of that matters. What matters is that the grain and the smear and the total technical incompetence of these things put something back that a full-frame sensor had quietly removed, and from there I fell into toy cameras properly, chasing that same lo-fi imperfection on purpose, the same thing that had quietly hooked me on old mechanical bodies years before I could name it.
So this is where I've landed, kit-wise, for now. The film rotation is an Olympus XA3 or a Lomo LC-A, and I only swap between them when I finally finish a roll, a rule I hold to so I don't end up with four half-shot rolls sitting around unaccounted for. Alongside that there's a cheap, unbranded 8-megapixel CMOS thing that shoots like garbage and has no screen, no settings, nothing to adjust or second-guess, which is precisely why it's fun. The X100 comes out when I want something that actually has to look good, or when I'm shooting something specific enough that I need control back. The Sony sits somewhere in the bag collecting dust, mostly waiting for someone to ask for a portrait so I have an excuse to put the 80mm on it and pretend I still care about that kind of precision. But even then I'll still grab the pocket digital shitbox and the Chuzhao mini camera on the way out, because those are the ones that still make me want to take the picture in the first place. None of them are technically good cameras. That's not incidental to why I love them, it's the reason. A flawed image has a fingerprint on it, a light leak, a soft edge, a color that's wrong in a way only that specific broken plastic lens gets wrong, and that fingerprint is the closest thing to a voice a photograph can have. Perfect images all start to look like nobody took them. The bad ones sound like me.
