One of my most deep-rooted interests since I can remember has been taking photos.

Once, when I was 16, I took every savings I had and bought my first compact camera. Unfortunately, once I took it out the store, I noticed something was wrong. Lesson learned: never buy a fucking refurbished camera. Anything can and will fail. Even worse if it's a compact one, because of no one would be willing replacing a damaged lens.

Since then, I hadn't had a single dedicated camera, and most of my work has been achieved through my phone's camera or someone else's (Sebastian Osorio's, mainly) camera.

However, that changed on last June 2019, when I came to a flea market with a friend of mine. I bought a ELO (I fucking love that band, as much as I love prog rock) compilation vinyl, and an analog camera.

After a quick run towards an ATM nearby —the market was about to close—, and not paying too much (200 COP, or 60 USD for the camera and two films) for a Praktica TL1000, I was pretty much ready to start my journey.

First lesson: fucking read the manual (or learn to load the film)

This is a thing you think you've done before. When I was a kid, I had one of those cameras a famous broasted chicken restaurant in Colombia gave away on their kid's menu these days. And I learned to load the film, and took some —pretty bad and certainly lost— photos with it.

But now, this camera, my camera was different. There's something wrong with the film. It just doesn't seem to work the standard way.

First time I loaded it, I saw a video instructing me how to do it. Pretty straightforward, it seemed.

It was not.

I took some photos (that film was designed for 12) and came to a photography centre to reveal the photos.

After a couple days, I got a response: there were no photos on that film. It was entirely blank! You wouldn't imagine my disappointment at that point. I took genuinely nice photos that time.

That time I just learned to make sure you correctly load the film into the camera. This is analog to "make sure you don't use a damaged SD Card —happened to me in the past—". Lesson finally learned.

Lesson two: rookie luck equals to no learning at all

Once I had the new film loaded, the next milestone was taking some photographs, or at least, that's the idea.

First load of photos went… too well, I guess. After minor corrections, and the obvious consequence of being my first analog-camera taken photos in years, I managed to take a nice bunch of pictures.

The problem is: as I would learn later, you might have nice conditions and end up with a nice session. So nice, you managed to meet your expectations, thus you didn't learn anything.

Lesson three: Learning exposure is key (or just read the fucking manual, again)

Heard of overexposing a photo?  This was, by far, the best I managed to correct. And it was a mess.

What happened, then? It was a combination of bad luck, and an awfully half-clouded cold, yet sunny day. But that's besides the point.

The real issue can be summarized in three points:

1. Not knowing how to manage the exposure of my camera,
2. Not minding on learn how to use it first, and
3. Not taking a practice film beforehand.

At the end of the day, I would get some good pictures, but also a lot of overexposed ones. You can see some of them, and comment your thoughts.

Lesson learned: keep learning how to use my camera.

Next steps

Few months ago, I managed to acquire a digital camera (Nikon D5300) I've used to improve my skills. That, combined the natural ease of taking more pictures and looking up the result immediately, has led to a gradual improvement of the quality of my photos.

However, that's a long road, and I'm hoping to come back time to time to the good old analog camera, just because I liked the interesting results I got.