I’ve been getting back into photography lately after a very long hiatus.

My grandpa left me an old Minolta SRT 101 35mm film camera he had a friend buy for him in Japan and bring back to the States in the late 1960s. That’s the camera I used when I took photography in high school.

The class was simple black and white photography. Film, darkroom, contact sheets, prints. No phone screen, no instant review, no Photoshop to save a shot you didn’t quite get right. You had to slow down. You had to think about light, exposure, focus, and timing in a pretty direct way.

I don’t want to pretend I was some amazing photographer back then, but I cared about it. I liked the process. I liked the feeling of trying to catch something real and then seeing it come alive later.

At some point, I drifted away from it. Part of that was life. Part of it was also gear. Years later I was gifted a fairly cheap Micro Four Thirds camera, probably around 2014 or 2015. Even when it was new, it never felt especially good. Pretty quickly phones started catching up to it, and then passing it in the situations where I was actually taking pictures. Once a phone could give me a decent looking image without much effort, carrying a separate camera started to feel less worth it.

For years after that, photography became something I still liked in theory, but not something I was really practicing. I’d still take pictures when I was somewhere interesting, but I wasn’t learning, and very few of the shots felt worth sharing.

But I don’t think I ever fully stopped wanting to get back into it. About three years ago I made a big goals list and hung it on my wall, and photography was on it. It just wasn’t at the top of the list. Some of that was priority. Some of that was money. Some of it was probably just the usual problem of knowing you want to do something but not quite making yourself start.

A few months ago I bought a Samsung Galaxy S24, and it was nice to have a phone that could take decent pictures again. But the bigger step came about a month ago when I bought a Sony a6700. A few weeks after that, I bought a second lens for it.

That has felt like a much bigger jump than I expected.

In some ways I feel like I’m learning photography all over again. The Sony is a much more powerful camera than anything I’ve owned before, but it’s also a lot more complicated. Sony cameras are known for having massive menus and endless settings, and now I understand why people say that. There are so many choices that it can feel like the camera is almost asking me what kind of photographer I want to be before I even know how to answer.

I’m relearning exposure, autofocus, lenses, RAW files, editing, and even my own eye. Historically, I’ve never thought of myself as amazing at capturing one perfect photo. I was better at taking a lot of photos during cool adventures and finding the good ones later. I was usually decent at editing, though. Now even that feels different because the files are better, the camera is more capable, and I have more room to either improve a photo or completely overdo it.

That part has been humbling.

I’ve also been thinking about why photography matters to me beyond just gear. I minored in philosophy in college, and I’ve always felt like photography and philosophy are connected. Photography changes how you pay attention.

When I’m not carrying a camera, I can get very stuck inside my own head. I can move through the world without really letting it in. With a camera, something changes. I start noticing light on buildings, shadows under trees, old signs, empty streets, train tracks, reflections, and little details I’d normally walk past.

Photography gets me outside of myself. More literally, it gets me outside. As I get older, I’m constantly reminded how strong habits are. I’m trying to use photography to interrupt those habits and actually experience the world around me.

I used to have a Canon compact camera in the mid to late 2000s, and I remember having fun experimenting with long exposure light trails and intentional camera movement. I liked the way the camera could turn motion into something strange. I’ve been trying to figure out how to do that again with the a6700.

Lately I’ve mostly been using the camera while hiking and urban exploring. That feels like a good place to start because I’m not forcing myself into some polished version of photography. I’m just bringing the camera with me into places I already want to go. Trails, overlooks, old buildings, bridges, and parts of Tulsa I’ve passed a hundred times but never really looked at closely.

For now, I want to get comfortable enough with the camera that it stops feeling like a wall between me and the image. I want to understand the settings well enough that I can make choices on purpose. I want to get better at seeing. A few recent shots from the first month back: