My uncle told me to just point and shoot with my first roll of film

I was at a family cookout in Toledo last summer, showing off my new old Pentax K1000. My uncle, who shot for a local paper in the 80s, took one look at me fiddling with the light meter and said, 'Kid, just load it, set it to f/8, and go find something interesting.' He argued that worrying about perfect exposure would make me miss the shot, but I've always read you should meter for every frame. Has anyone else gotten advice to just wing it on their first roll?

2 comments

2 Comments

andrew9161mo ago

Totally get that advice lol. My grandpa said the same thing with my first roll, told me to just focus on seeing pictures instead of numbers. It really helped me stop overthinking and actually enjoy shooting. Sometimes you gotta just trust the process and see what happens.

campbell.logan1mo ago

But what about when the numbers are the whole point? I tried just shooting for pictures on a manual camera and ended up with a whole roll of black frames because my settings were way off. For me, learning the rules like shutter speed and aperture first meant I could actually make the pictures I saw in my head later. Doesn't trusting the process sometimes mean learning the technical stuff so it becomes automatic?