There’s a specific kind of creative rut I’ve noticed in my own work and in the students I teach: you stop seeing and start capturing. Your camera becomes a machine you point at things, and the magic of actually choosing a frame quietly disappears. I hit that wall a couple of years ago during a trip to Iceland. I came home with 1,400 raw files and felt nothing looking at them. Every shot was technically fine. None of them felt earned.

In this Peter McKinnon tutorial, he documents his return to film photography after 15-plus years away from it, and what unfolds is less a gear review and more a masterclass in shooting intentionally. Watch the full tutorial on YouTube - but read this first, because the technique buried inside this video is something you can apply today, even if you never touch a film camera in your life.

The core lesson is this: constraints are a creative tool, not a limitation. Film forces you to slow down because you literally cannot afford to spray-and-pray. But you don’t need film to adopt the mindset. What follows is a breakdown of exactly how McKinnon and his friend Angel approach a shoot, from first impression to final scan, and what each step teaches about becoming a more deliberate photographer.

Step 1: Let the Scene Interrupt You

The first thing that happens in this video isn’t technical at all. McKinnon and his friend Angel are walking, and something stops them. A beat-up van with leaves sitting perfectly on the hood. McKinnon admits flat-out that if they’d been carrying their digital mirrorless cameras, they would have walked right past it.

This is a practice, not an accident. When you’re out with a phone or a film camera, your guard is lower. You’re not in “production mode.” Train yourself to pause whenever something gives you that small gut-pull of interest, even if you can’t immediately explain why. The explanation usually comes through the viewfinder.

Step 2: Switch Into a Different Compositional Mode

Angel framing the van shot through the Pentax 67 viewfinder Angel framing the van shot through the Pentax 67 viewfinder Angel describes actively shifting his brain into “film mode” when he’s shooting analog. What does that actually mean? He’s looking for stillness, for graphic shapes, for light that does something specific. He’s not hunting for action or the decisive moment the way you might with digital. He’s looking for a frame that could live on a wall.

You can replicate this by setting yourself a constraint before you leave the house. Tell yourself you’re only shooting scenes that are completely still. Or only shooting things that are more than 20 feet away. Or only shooting in a single square block. The container doesn’t matter much. What matters is that it forces your eye to work differently than it did yesterday.

Step 3: Meter Deliberately, Then Commit

Angel using a handheld light meter pointed toward the subject Angel using a handheld light meter pointed toward the subject Angel pulls out a handheld incident light meter and points it toward his subject to read the exposure. He lands on f/8 for the scene. This is the opposite of chimping, which is the habit of shooting a frame, checking the LCD, adjusting, and shooting again. With film, you meter, you decide, and you press the shutter. That’s it.

Even if you shoot digital, try turning off your LCD preview for a session. Meter with your in-camera meter or a dedicated app, set your exposure manually, and don’t look at the back of the camera until you’ve moved on to your next scene. You will become dramatically better at reading light within a few weeks of doing this consistently.

Step 4: Understand Why Aperture Behaves Differently on Larger Formats

Close-up of the Pentax 67 medium format camera body Close-up of the Pentax 67 medium format camera body Angel is shooting a Pentax 67, a medium format film camera, and McKinnon points out that f/8 on medium format gives you a depth of field that would look like f/2.8 on a full-frame sensor. This isn’t just trivia. It changes how you think about sharpness and separation across the entire frame.

If you shoot full-frame or crop sensor, f/8 is generally your sharpest aperture with the most depth of field. On medium format, f/8 still gives you beautiful subject separation. The practical takeaway: when you look at film photos online and wonder how they got that specific look, a big part of it is the format itself, not just the film stock or the lens.

Step 5: Develop the Film with a Leader Card

Technician trimming the film leader and inserting the leader card Technician trimming the film leader and inserting the leader card At the lab, the first physical step before development is trimming the film leader and attaching what’s called a leader card. This plastic card threads through the processor and pulls the film through the chemistry evenly. Without it, the film can’t travel through the machine at a consistent rate, which means uneven development.

You don’t need to know how to do this yourself if you’re dropping film at a lab, but understanding it helps you communicate with your lab and appreciate why certain processing errors happen. If you ever see streaking or uneven density across a roll, a leader card issue or an agitation problem in the developer is usually the first place to look.

Step 6: Use the Contact Preview to Edit Before You Scan

Reviewing unscanned negatives on a light table for sharpness Reviewing unscanned negatives on a light table for sharpness After development, McKinnon and Angel hold the negatives up to the light to do a first pass edit before anything gets scanned. They’re checking for basic sharpness, rough exposure, and whether the image even exists. At this stage they’re also making basic color and density corrections that will carry into the scan.

This is a reminder that editing starts at selection, not in Lightroom. One of the best habits I’ve built into my own workflow is doing a brutally honest first cull before I even open my editing software. I go through every frame at a small size and ask one question: would I be proud to send this to someone right now? If no, it doesn’t make the next round. You’ll edit faster and end up with a stronger final set.

What I’d Add From My Own Experience

If you’re returning to film after a long break, or picking it up for the first time, give yourself permission to finish a full roll before you judge any of it. My Sunday morning photo walks are where I’ve done most of my analog experimenting, and the early rolls were humbling. Blurry, underexposed, compositionally chaotic. But by roll three or four, something clicked. My eye was quieter. I was looking more and shooting less, and that carried back into how I shoot digitally the rest of the week.

The discipline film builds is the real product. The photos are almost secondary.

The single most transferable idea from this video is that the camera you’re holding shapes the way you see. Film doesn’t automatically make you a better photographer, but the scarcity it creates forces the kind of attention that does. Try it on any camera by limiting yourself to 36 frames per outing, no deleting allowed. You’ll start seeing differently almost immediately.

Watch the full tutorial on YouTube to see McKinnon’s full lab visit, the development process in real time, and the moment he sees his first roll come out of the scanner.