This Olympus Trip 35 was my first camera.

And, looking back, this vintage film camera is the reason I’m sitting here today, running this blog, still obsessed with camera gear.

This camera had a history. My father bought it in the 1960s when he moved to Portugal to study medicine.

A decade later, by the time he returned to Macau as a doctor, he had moved on to the serious stuff: he got himself a Canon AE-1 Program that I featured here before.

With the Canon and a set of fast primes, the Olympus Trip 35 turned into a hand-me-down for a small curious kid.

So this is how it all started.

I was a little boy, not even 10 years old. But for me the Olympus wasn’t a toy. It was a scientific experiment.

It triggered my curiosity.

I spent hours trying to understand how it worked. I didn’t care about art yet. I knew nothing about photography as an art form. I only cared about the mechanics of the camera.

Film cost money and I didn’t have any, I was a kid. I would play with the camera, shooting without any film, observe the shutter mechanism with the camera back open. Then re-cock the shutter, observe the workings of the film advance mechanism.

I would change the settings and shoot again and again, trying to identify any changes resulting from my adjustments. Verify if the shutter stayed open for longer or shorter, check the aperture blades.

It was probably all barely visible by the naked eye. But imagination took care of the rest. I could see the light rays coming in the black box and then its access blocked once the shutter was closed.

The beauty of a camera like the Olympus Trip 35 is the mechanical simplicity.

With the back open, you can see the inner workings and understand how everything ticks. It’s a black box, light doesn’t go in unless you press the trigger, because it opens the shutter to let the light in for a fraction of a second and hit the film that is sensitive to light. Re-cock the shutter and the film advances as you pull the lever, ready for the next shot.

It’s that simple.

All transparent for you to see, to understand, to learn.

Needless to say, can’t do any of this with a present day camera. Instead, people are concerned with intelligent AF and other bells and whistles. I bet most of them don’t even understand the basics described above.

I do, and that’s because I had this Olympus Trip 35. Old school, good school. Yet it does not answer the fundamental question.

Why was I so captivated by the process?

There was something about the alchemy of film, that brown strip of plastic, that felt like some sort of black magic. As I clicked the shutter, reality was physically etched onto it. Film was sensitive to light, it was exotic. I think this is what got me.

Digital replaced film long ago and there is no more alchemy. No more magic from the chemical sense. Now it’s all about 1/0, ones and zeroes. Data and algorithms. We talk about sensors now: CCD, CMOS, 1-inch, M4/3, APS-C, full frame, medium format. But why am I still like this, decades later?

Why am I still obsessed with cameras?

Is it the tactile click of a dial? The weight of the metal? Am I trying to find that same sense of wonder I had when I first got my Olympus?

It taught me the essence of the craft. It was simple, it was honest, and it required me to actually understand light.

It turned a childhood curiosity into a lifelong obsession.