Back before digital, photography frustrated the hell out of me. It’s an expensive hobby and I was poor back then, so I didn’t have very good cameras or lenses. And there was the whole buying film and paying for processing and prints. On top of the expense, it took a few years for me to finally figure out that film processing and printing at Wal-Mart or the drugstore or even a dedicated photography lab was notoriously unreliable. It all became too much for me and I pretty much gave up on pursuing photography as a hobby and turned to golf. I did shoot a lot film for the podunky newspapers I worked for in the ’90s but that was mostly recording news events. The technical and artistic quality of the photo was well down on the priority list. Plus it was impossible to get decent reproduction on a newspaper press, so I didn’t sweat the details too much. When I got a DSLR back in 2007 I learned more about photography in a year than I had learned in the previous 20 years just because of the sheer amount of photos you can shoot and the instantaneous feedback on the back of the camera. I got it in my head that I could put that knowledge to use and go back and conquer my film demons. But I wanted to shoot something larger than 35mm. Film equipment is now very cheap compared to 10-15 years ago, so I had several realistic options in medium-format equipment. The medium format frame is four times larger than a 35 mm frame. All things being equal, that translates into better quality because it doesn’t have to be enlarged as much as 35mm. It seemed pretty cool to me. I ended up going with the cheapest option, though, because it’s the coolest looking: the twin lens reflex. The version I got is the YashicaMat 124G. It had been recently overhauled and is in great working order.
