Not to pull an “Oh! The golden days!”, but as part of the generation that doesn’t fully remember life pre-internet, I feel like there are some important practices that I missed out on. Not necessarily know-how. Again, that’s what the internet’s for. I can find whatever I want to as long as I know I’m looking for it. But the intuition of analog is certainly not there.

The biggest practice I feel like I’ve lost touch with is existing in linear time. I spend so much of my day in front of a computer, at any second able to reference information from centuries ago or from just a few days ago, and because it all exists on the same plane my brain is somehow tricked into conflating their place in the general succession of things. The internet turns history into a collage.

I was thinking about this when I stopped in an antique store at lunch yesterday and purchased an old SLR. My purchase was inspired by a desire to reclaim a slightly different kind of practice, one more related to my work, but still in the same bent. I wanted to feel the physical process behind capturing an image, to give it a bit more substance, to understand composition through a viewfinder, not a 4K monitor, and force myself to interact with the scene more immediately before taking the shot, to get more intimate with those image-producing light photons.