The Most Important Upgrade Isn't a New Camera
Regardless of whether you've been making pictures for years or have just picked up your first camera, there's no denying that cameras are desirable and fascinating things.
I remember getting my first camera, a Canon FTb. I quickly became obsessed with how it felt in my hands, the click of the shutter when I pressed the button, the sheer weight of the thing. I spent years playing around with that camera, not totally sure what I was doing. My only instruction was to make sure the little needle in the viewfinder sat inside the circle on the right-hand side. As long as the needle was in the right place, I'd make a "correct" exposure and all would be well.
Yet my pictures were blurry, underexposed, overexposed and out of focus. I'd be lucky to get one semi-decent image from a roll.
Sound familiar?
The obvious problem was the camera, definitely not the user.
So I started an odyssey to find the right camera. I bought weird SLRs, Soviet rangefinders and compact cameras in the hope that they would improve my success rate. Cameras like the compacts did give me more technically successful pictures, but they didn't look how I wanted them to. The Soviet rangefinders often arrived with technical issues and were a nightmare to use.
Many of these cameras didn't have light meters, and I didn't understand exposure well enough to set the controls confidently. Maybe I needed a different format? Maybe I should get a medium format camera, or try 5×4? The odyssey continued.
I bought myself a Holga 120, essentially a children's toy. It's probably the most fun camera I've ever used. Shooting from the hip, coloured flash, accidental double exposures, what's not to love?
But I still had little control over the results, and my success rate remained low.
One thing I did realise was that I absolutely loved the look of medium format film. There seemed to be more detail and definition. Black and white images looked smooth and velvety, grain appeared finer, and I felt like I was getting closer to the right camera.
I continued on this journey from the age of fourteen until I was twenty-three. Then one day I had an epiphany, or rather a rude awakening to the source of my photographic misfortune.
I was taking some test pictures on a newly acquired Mamiya RB67. For those in the know, this is a formidable camera, packed with technical capabilities and loaded with the medium format film I'd fallen in love with.
As I composed an image and took a meter reading, I shouted to a colleague:
"It doesn't really matter what aperture I use, does it? I just need to get the exposure right... right?"
He looked at me with a mixture of confusion and pity and replied:
"It ABSOLUTELY matters what aperture you use."
In that moment I'd been rumbled. I'd exposed a huge gap in my knowledge and finally had to confront it. After nearly a decade of taking photographs, I had to learn what aperture, shutter speed and ISO actually did.
From that point on, my tests weren't about working out whether a camera functioned properly. They were about understanding the difference between apertures, how shutter speed affected an image, and what role ISO played in the process.
After plenty of trial and error, it finally clicked.
Understanding these technical controls gave me creative freedom.
No more "shoot and hope". No more crossing my fingers and waiting for the negatives to come back. My success rate improved dramatically and, when I made mistakes, they were more likely to be compositional than technical disasters.
From that point onwards, I could pick up almost any camera, film or digital, 35mm or large format, and understand how to use it. It was a complete game changer. It allowed me to draw a line under my photographic practice and start again properly.
Acquiring gear was no longer about how cool a camera looked or what format film it used. It became about choosing the right tool for the job, the camera that best translated the image I already had in my head.
The moral of the story?
You don't need to understand every technical aspect of photography to make photographs. Plenty of people make brilliant images without obsessing over the mechanics.
However, if you want to consistently create the photographs you see in your mind's eye, it helps enormously to understand how your camera works. Exposure, aperture, shutter speed and ISO aren't barriers to creativity, they're tools that help you realise it.
The irony is that after years spent chasing the perfect camera, what I really needed was a better understanding of the one I already had.
If you'd like a shortcut through some of that confusion, take a look at the Introduction to Film Photography workshops we run here at Take It Easy Lab. Our aim is to demystify the process, improve your success rate, help you get more from every roll of film, and encourage you to spend more time thinking about pictures and less time thinking about gear.