Fall Upgrade Week feels like an odd time to celebrate my move to a 50-year-old film camera, but there’s logic to it: not because film photos are timeless, or because I want to wax lyrical about warmth and grain and analog appeal, but because I don’t think there’s any better way to teach yourself about photography.
That’s how I got into film. At some point over the last decade, reviewing phones morphed more or less into reviewing cameras with touchscreens on the back. For a writer with no photography experience, that started to become a problem, and I realized that I needed to learn enough about cameras to hold my own. I was having to take …