e-510 26mm 1/250 f/6.3 iso 100

On Sunday afternoon I turned off my camera. No, not with the on/off switch rather I undigitized it, turned off the record review (when you get to see what you’ve just taken on the LCD), meaning taking me back 10 years to the level of my Canon Elan 2, and then I uncoupled it from autofocus a la the Pentax ME super I was using in the mid-90s.

And then I just made it like my first SLR, the Practica I cut my SLR chops on circa 1980, tossing all technology aside and turning off the TTL metering too, instead using a Primo Star incident meter I bought at a thrift store for a dollar three years ago, a thing so dated that its “made in Japan” labeling is actually an indication of even more shoddy than “made in China” seems today. That said, it works, and is deliciously inaccurate in wonderfully different ways at each EV step, and it never really is all that wrong, only interestingly so. As for the focus, f/6.3 at a26mm, a hyperfocal-huge margin for error, which is good because the viewfinder in the 510 just isn’t of the sort you’d want to MF with as a rule.

Above, the result of all this Luddism, technically not snazzy but I think there’s a certain appeal to it I would not have managed had I left my gear to its own (and much wiser) devices.