33 RPM and 36 Shots: Going Analog with Vinyl and Film

There’s something charming about owning a physical thing that’s yours. Maybe it’s the hoarder in me that’s talking, but I really like having things that I physically can hold and appreciate. I really like postcards, stamps, coins, and tiny trinkets from various trips and events - it’s an insignia of the memories associated with that moment. Yeah, it’s a stamp. But what about taking a detour to visit the post office, standing in line with ten people ahead of you, and talking to an employee asking for stamps for your collection? Maybe I am a hoarder…

I’ve recently fulfilled (well, am en route to fulfilling) one of my bucket-list items¹: having my own record player. It’s always been fascinating to me how physical grooves with depth and width is sound. The invisible, but very physical, sound waves are physically encoded in the vinyl record. When the needle runs along the grooves, it reproduces that exact sound. This has been and will always be magic to me. Kings and Things has an excellent video on YouTube about The Oldest Voices We Can Still Hear.

33 RPM

I found a second-hand listing for a Technics SL-D2, an absolute unit of a player produced in 1980. Having done some cursory research about turntables for weeks, I know that the older Technics are great since they’re built to last forever. Exemplary Japanese engineering by Technics, the maker of one of the best-selling turntables: the SL-1200.

I visited the seller, checked that it worked, and I bought it on the spot:

The second-hand Technics SL-D2 I bought, sitting next to an orange Mastodon Plushie.

I brought it back home, gave it a good cleaning, replaced the four-decade old stylus with an AudioTechnica AT-VM95E, hooked it up to a Fosi Audio Box X2 MM pre-ampfilier, and connected it to some active speakers. After putting on a vinyl and spinning it up, the music it played was magical.

There’s something different about being forced to listen to the entire album, you know, compared to scrolling through a list of songs and clicking the one that’s been on repeat this week. You’re listening to a story as the artist intended it. Some albums are a musical journey, like Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Stories intertwine, songs pause and resume, melodies from one continue to the next one (I think Linkin Park does this pretty well)… the entire album tells a story.

Some people say that vinyl sounds better than digital. At the risk of being thrown into a pit by audiophiles: I cannot tell the difference, probably because I don’t have the greatest set up. There are a lot of people who say that vinyl sounds ‘warmer’ than digital. I believe this to be true, although I cannot hear the difference. Vinyls are mastered differently than digital audio: “one of which (…) for a digital source to make it loud, and another one with no limiting whatsoever (…) and that’s the one I’ll use for the vinyl master” - Miles Showell, in Cutting Vinyl At Abbey Road by Sound on Sound Magazine on YouTube.

I recently visited a second-hand record store in Budapest where the employee told me that some modern vinyl cuts are pretty awful - they often take the digital master and just press that onto the vinyl. “Just buy second-hand records from previous years, as long as they’re in good condition”, is what he said to me. I was pretty surprised and didn’t know how true it was, until I came across this fascinating blog article by Jeff from MagicVinylDigital which shows the evidence.

For me, vinyl is about the experience: grabbing a cup of coffee, putting on a record, moving the tone arm over to place it gently on the lead-in groove, sitting on the sofa and waiting for a few seconds for the first song, and eventually flipping the record to the B-side. There’s something very wondrous about the physicality of it all. Some records are have gatefold covers with beautiful art inside, others have inserts, album notes, and details that you just don’t see with digital music.

Maybe I am a hoarder after all:

The current, I-just-started collection (left to right, top to bottom): Pink Floyd - The Wall; L. Dre - Lofi Symphony; Chet Baker - My Funny Valentine; Ryo Fukui - My Favorite Tunes; Efterklang - Things We Have In Common; The Bill Evans Trio - Moon Beams; DOMi & JD Beck - Not Tight; Bill Evans - Portraits in Jazz; Vivaldi - The Masterpieces Of Antonio Vivaldi; Journey - Escape; Oliver Nelson Sextet - The Blues and The Abstract Truth; Gonda János - Vonzások És Választások; Peter Cat Recording Co. - Beta; Linkin Park - From Zero; Miles Davis - Kind of Blue; Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures; In the center: Manwolves - Shreddy Krueger / These Days (45 RPM)

I still don’t understand how they managed to trap the artists’ voices in a physical disk. I guess they can only escape when they’re spun at 33 RPM.

36 Shots

Back in December 2025, I bought a second-hand film camera — a Minolta X-700. I knew very little about photography, even less so about film. The shop employee must have been pretty surprised: I just walked, said that I have no idea about film photography, and I want to get into it. The shop employees at Foto Köberl in Graz are great (not an ad, genuinely nice people) — they walked me through all the things I needed and suggested the Minolta X-700 with a few lenses for roughly a 250 Eur budget. After placing a roll of Kodak Gold 200 in my hand and patting me on the back, I was pushed out into the real world to go take photos:

The beautiful Minolta X-700

Of course, I went home first to watch multiple tutorials about how to do film photography, handle the Minolta X-700, and try to understand what aperture, shutter, and ISO really meant. I learnt how to load and rewind the film, the different modes (aperture priority, program select), and how to change the ISO setting based on the current film.

The most interesting aspect of working the camera was the manual method of focusing. In the center is a split-prism, which horizontally splits the image in the center. When the top half and bottom half are aligned, the subject is in focus:

Top-Center: the scene with a rubik's cube; Bottom-Left: out of focus, the top-half and bottom-half of the cube do not line up; Bottom-Right: in focus, the top-half and bottom-half of the cube line up.

I was much too scared to go out in broad daylight to practice in the real world, so I decided to go at night… for the first time shooting film… with ISO 200 film… without a tripod… and without any knowledge of the beast that is nighttime film photography. I walked around the christmas-decorated city of Graz at 20:00, shooting my first-ever roll while taking a shot whenever the light sensor showed a 1/30s exposure time. When complete, I just couldn’t rewind it properly and ended up pulling it out manually (makes me sad to this day).

I loaded the second roll, shot all 36 photos, and took it to the camera store for them to rewind it for me. They showed me how to do it properly, sent it for development, and called me a week later when the scanning was done. The photos were… terrible. Most of the 36 photos were quite shaken, not properly focused, and quite dark, i.e., underexposed. All except one:

A wonderfully-arranged, bright assortment of Christmas ornaments courtesy of Ferdinand Haller, Graz, Austria.

If this photo hadn’t come out this spectacular, I would have probably stopped film photography altogether. All the other photos were quite shook — in the end, I ended up posting only 13/36 photos to my first collection: Graz'25 Winter (includes some pictures from another roll I took later).

Since my first roll almost 6 months ago, I’ve spent a lot of time on film, getting rolls developed and scanned. But the progress has been good and I’m happy with most photos I take these days. Here are some of my favorite ones, with all of them browseable at: https://fotos.snee.la/

The film you get back is a physical representation of that moment in space and time - it’s physical! There was a moment in time, and the photographer let enough light from that moment hit a sensitive portion of film. And it’s there on that film now. I should probably get rid of all the rolls I’ve had developed and scanned though…

You know, there’s something charming about owning a physical thing that’s yours. Maybe it’s the hoarder in me that’s talking, but I really like having things that I physically can hold and appreciate.