My grandfather's Zenit weighs roughly the same as a brick and meters light with all the subtlety of one. I love it beyond reason. Once a month I give it one roll, thirty-six frames, and one afternoon in the old town, and whatever comes back is what comes back.
The rules are self-imposed and strict. No second attempts at the same picture. No checking, because there is nothing to check. If a frame is gone, it is gone, and you walk on past the balconies to look for the next one. My friends with digital cameras take four hundred pictures on the same walk and choose none of them. I take thirty-six and keep eleven. On a good roll, fourteen.
Being on the other side of a camera all week makes this practice feel like eating a meal you cooked yourself. On set, someone else worries about the light while I worry about my shoulders and my jaw and the story in my eyes. On the roll days, the worry is all mine, and every mistake is instructive in a way that being told to turn my chin never is.
The frame I kept this month: an old man feeding pigeons outside the sulfur baths, steam rising behind him like a backdrop no stylist could order. Underexposed by a stop. Keeping it anyway. The darkroom forgives what the histogram never would.