Don’t get me wrong, mechanical cameras are awesome, I love the feel of the film advance lever, hearing the roll move forward as you pull, rotating dials to adapt to different shooting situations, and the click they make when firing the shutter is all awesome. As an engineer I can also appreciate the complexity in the mechanisms (even if I’m not smart enough to understand how they work :p ).
But sadly, there are three issues that come up when I use mechanical cameras, well, I guess it’s one quirk that manifests as two issues, which, to be fair are not really issues.
Since they are fully manual, you need to set up aperture and speed whenever shooting conditions change, this is not necessarily a bad thing but it does make shooting slower and takes me out of “focus” (smooth foreshadow from the next section), i.e. I’m too stupid to remember to change the speed and aperture when I’m in the mood to take pictures.
The other issue is focus, while I don’t normally forget to focus on my subject, I do suck at focusing manually, what looks good to my astigmatic eyes isn’t what actually looks good in the picture, autofocus has been a lifesaver!
Lastly, the exposure, while my Nikon F and my late Nikkormat FTN both have light meters, I guess they have deteriorated (which would not be surprising after like 60 or 70 years), because I was able to source compatible batteries and the readings they give do not result in accurate exposures. The meter on the F601 is fully electronic, not an analog patchwork of components, it lets me relax that the resulting picture will be accurately exposed.