The Business Casual Backpacker: Digitized

The summer after my sophomore year, I spent almost every weekday afternoon in my high school photo lab. The photography teacher, Mr. Couch—this was prep school, so we called him Couchie—was a genial, absent-minded fellow with a kind smile and a wandering pair of glasses.

The semester before, I'd taken my first class with Couchie. He taught us the basics of framing and shooting, then each step of the development process: rolling back the film, measuring out the chemicals, and my favorite part—the heart-pounding few minutes in the dark when you load the film onto the spool, feeling around for the right angle, trying not to touch the delicate face of each square and ruin the roll.

I learned to take pictures on my mom's old Pentax, a satisfyingly heavy silver and black box with a manual winder. When I graduated from college, she got me the slightly updated version of the same camera, a Pentax ZX-M. It worked faithfully from day one; the most I ever had to do was replace the batteries, the filter, and (countless times) the lens cap.

The Pentax never stopped its tireless march from country to country, state to state, recording my life in piles of matching Walgreens albums with faux-gold lettering. But I did—reluctantly, nostalgically—send it into early retirement when I finally entered the digital age this past summer.

My new travel buddy is a Canon Rebel XTi. The endless menus and settings are mystifying, and I know it can do a thousand tricks I don't think to ask of it. Nothing is left to chance anymore, and that's a loss, but I've been pleasantly surprised to find it hasn't changed my eye or the excitement of capturing time and space in a frame.

And when I miss the adrenalin rush of slipping open the envelope at the camera shop to see what turned out and what didn't, I can always pull the Pentax off its pedestal and take it on a field trip. I just hope I don't forget how to load the film.