Last February, the New York Times finally noted what many of us have known for a while now: Gen Z has returned to old cameras. “Teens, celebrities and influencers alike have been snapping up 20-year-old digital cameras to take lower-quality photos with high-quality vibes,” wrote Annemarie Conte, referencing Ayo Edebiri’s 8.1-megapixel Sony Cybershot as a prime producer of the “grainy, often blown-out” images those users want to capture.
Film Photography
It’s totally understandable that, having lived with smartphones for nearly a generation, we no longer see them as cameras. Yes, we use them to take pictures of friends, family, pets and events ... but we also use them to capture receipts, make shopping lists and remember our parking space. We lost the thrill of shooting photos … or, that is, we had, until Gen Z swooped in to save our asses one more time.
If you’re now picking up a proper camera with only the experience of shooting with a smartphone, its numerous buttons, switches and dials might feel intimidating. But here’s the thing: Eventually you’ll want to mess with them, because the bizarro magic of photography truly resides in a camera’s manual settings. You’ll want to play with the shutter speed to freeze or elongate time. You’ll want to noodle with aperture (the F-stops) to control light and change your depth-of-field. And you’ll want to experiment with ISO speeds—either digitally, or by trying out different varieties of film—to further tweak what your camera can do with light and motion, and to add or reduce image grain.
There are many, many tutorials available to neophyte photographers—on the web, in bookstores and libraries and in local schools. (Venerable west Valley camera shop B&C occasionally offers a “Photography 101” course; visit bandccamera.com and look under “Las Vegas Locals” for details.) That being said—and I hope I don’t invoke the condemnation of the many professional photographers I know by saying this—the best way to teach yourself camera photography is to turn the mode dial to “manual” and mess around. Learn from yourself. Shoot 24 exposures; get 2 good ones.That’s how I did it, first by using a beaten-up 35mm Mamiya/Sekor 1000 DTL and later a Kodak DC4800 digital point-and-shoot, and it’s how I continue to do it today with my mirrorless Nikon Z6II and a variety of Polaroid instants.
If you feel lost, there are guideposts you can follow. You should familiarize yourself with the (easily Googled) exposure triangle; save a copy for reference. And if you’re shooting with a digital camera in automatic mode, look at the settings of the photographs you’ve already taken: Which ISO, shutter and F-stop settings did the camera choose when you shot a nighttime street? A hiking trail, by early morning light? A midafternoon party?
Experiment, learn, make mistakes (some mistakes turn out not to be!), keep track of what works and what doesn’t. Before long, you’ll be a full-on Ayo Edebiri—camera in hand and distracting phone stashed away, looking to make some bizarro magic.
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