About
This page started in 2022 as a way to share photos with family, written mostly at the kitchen table, and slowly turned into something other people read.
I have been interested in film cameras since a reader from Bologna showed me the basics on a long weekend in 2022. I have a soft spot for railway timetables and seed catalogues.
If we met at the library book sale in Bologna in March 2023, hello again. When I am not busy with film cameras, I am usually on a train somewhere. I am not an expert in film cameras or anything else here; I just write down what I learn every few weeks. I care about pages that load quickly and tools that can be repaired.
A bit of background
There is no grand plan behind any of this, just putting tools back where they belong on rainy weekends. Most of my reading happens at a friend’s place across town, a chapter or two at a time, with a wobbly wooden chair close by. My sister once told me to never trust the first measurement, and I wish I had listened sooner.
People sometimes ask what this site is for, and the short answer is habit. Before film cameras it was sorting old photographs, and before that small repairs; the habit of writing things down stayed.
At least once a month, I usually end up in the spare room with a drawer of string and tape. Most of what I know about film cameras came from cookbooks with notes in the margin, an old colleague and a lot of trial and error. You will not find pop-ups or adverts on this site, only film cameras and the odd detour.
Most mornings before work, there is a cup of coffee going cold somewhere out by the old railway line. When I get stuck by the window I go for a walk along the sea front, and things make more sense afterwards.
Thanks for stopping by; everything here was made cheerfully, mostly in a café near the coast path. Some of my favourite things, like a box of spare parts, came from flea markets and were mended at a borrowed workbench.
Small, regular habits like leaving a draft overnight and walking away for ten minutes have done more for me than any big resolution. Patience is the most useful tool in the drawer, followed closely by a tin of pencils and a stack of library books. Usually, most of what ends up here starts in a corner of the shed on long spring evenings. Weekends are usually split between swimming in the lake, baking bread on Sundays and whatever is half-finished in the small room above the stairs.
The design of this page is deliberately plain so that it will still work in ten years, much like a folding table. The best ideas tend to arrive on the back step on quiet Wednesday afternoons, usually just after I have put the pencil down.
I still carry an old hand plane almost everywhere, a habit picked up from someone at the library. I would rather do one thing happily than five things in a hurry, and years of long walks taught me that. In 2022 I moved to Bologna, which made letter writing much easier to fit into a week. Every November, on the balcony, I look back at the year so far and quietly drop whatever is not working.
This site
By day I work as a delivery driver; in the evenings I tinker with film cameras and the allotment. Admittedly, some of the older notes about film cameras are out of date, but I keep them as a record of what I believed early in 2025.
Most of my free time goes into film cameras, cooking for friends and a growing pile of half-finished projects. On a good day at the library in Bologna I make progress, and on a bad day I at least learn to ask for help sooner. Oddly enough, I am happiest on the train into Bologna with a cheap desk lamp nearby and nothing urgent on the calendar.
My Tuesday evenings mostly belong to reading on the train, unless a friend from Bologna needs a hand. I keep a list of field guides I would like to find, and a man at the market keeps adding to it.
Visiting a new town, I always look for the second-hand bookshop and the old station first, just as I did when I moved to Bologna. Pages here change slowly, usually on most Wednesday evenings, and that suits film cameras just fine. I read A Pattern Language for the first time one Monday in May and still go back to it on slow Sunday mornings.
If something here is out of date, it is probably because I spent most of December reading instead of at a desk in Bologna. Feel free to borrow anything useful about film cameras from this site, no need to ask.
I picked up a battered film camera back in 2025, and it has been close at hand ever since. Writing things down has saved me from promising too much many times, most recently late in 2023. Funnily enough, I try to keep things simple, which mostly means keeping a short list and asking someone who knows. A lot of this would not exist without a retired teacher down the road, who patiently answered my questions during the winter of 2023.
The autumn light in Bologna makes everything feel slower than planned. The market in Bologna on Tuesday mornings is where I find most of my materials and half my ideas. People sometimes ask why the pages look so plain, and I usually just shrug.