In our always-connected world, the way we capture our surroundings has changed almost beyond memory. We tap a screen, perhaps dozens of times in a day, and document our lives into a digital image bank on a mobile device that is always within reach. Most of these images are forgotten until they pop up on an “on this day” nostalgia-bomb on a social media platform.
We are addicted to capturing moments and sending them out into the world before they have settled in our minds. But what happened to a world where photography was a choice, a process, and every shot mattered? I had an opportunity to journey back to that world, and rediscover our home city, Lincoln, through a retro lens.
Alex and I were invited by Not Quite North, a vintage camera shop in Lincoln, to borrow one of their cameras and shoot a full film roll of 25 photos. No specific brief; anything was on the table, and once our shoot was done the team at Not Quite North would develop and scan the photos for us.
So, on a dreary December Sunday with the city’s streets deserted, we set to the task.
Pressure on every click
When you usually have the luxury of snapping a dozen photos just to get one “good” one, there is suddenly a lot of pressure when you need to get it right first time. But, in a strange way, it is also liberating.
Immediately, the process of taking photos becomes more intentional. I had forgotten what it felt like to pause, to be sure before pressing the shutter – one frame, one chance.
Without an instant preview, a quiet unease settled in. What if they all turned out terribly? There was no way to know until we got the film developed.
When I was a kid, I remember that unease felt more like excitement, waiting to flip through photos from a family holiday and see moments I barely remembered captured forever.
Exploring Lincoln through a viewfinder
The camera we borrowed from Not Quite North was a gold Olympus MJU Zoom point and shoot, loaded with a Kodak ColourPlus 35mm film.
One feature that distinctly set it apart from modern digital cameras was the viewfinder. Using this was maybe the most interesting part of the whole experiment for me. We don’t tend to use viewfinders any more; we use screens.
I had to trust my eye, to really think about each shot. When you’re using a phone or digital camera, you see on the screen what it’s going to look like before you press the button.
With this task, holding an analog film camera, I had to frame the moment and hope for the best. There was something exciting about that, but, with only 25 shots in the film, there was also no room for mistakes.
In this photostory I’ll do my best to take you on a journey through our shoot, and explain why we chose the scenes and frames that you will see here. All the images below are raw and unedited; after all, running our analog shots through a modern filter would kind of miss the point.
Bad weather brings good light
We only had one free day for our photoshoot, and so we were disappointed at first that it was grey and drizzling in Lincoln when we set out.
There is a bit of an urban myth that sunshine is always the ideal backdrop for photography. But in reality, the dreary weather, overcast light and the analog camera combined beautifully to frame the mood of the day.
With a grey-white sky, the light was naturally flat, with no shadows. The camera picks up all the dark tones on windows and doors, creating a sombre, high contrast, accentuated further by the wet cobblestones on the ground.
We began by exploring uphill Lincoln and the city’s classic historical landmarks around the Cathedral Quarter. Quite predictably, I wanted to used some of our photo quota to capture the city’s most famous icon of all: Lincoln Cathedral.
Being the UK’s fourth-largest cathedral by floor space and once the tallest building in the world, there are countless vantage points around the cathedral and infinite possibilities to frame it in a photo. We decided to focus on the grassy knoll next to the chapter house, on the corner of Priory Gate and Eastgate.
This little corner of the cathedral’s exterior lets you get up close to some of its most intricate features. The qualities of the film camera help to capture the finer details of the architecture – all the delicate swirls and deep crevices in the windows are brought out in a way you might not notice in a digital photograph, as the tone would be automatically fixed for you.
We brought our dog Regan along with us on the photoshoot, partly for the company, partly because he had no say in the matter, but mostly because it doubled as his morning walk. While in the cathedral grounds, we decided to attempt a portrait of him – a challenge that took “one frame, one change” to the extreme.
Taking mobile phone photos of Regan might be the most excessive example of when we snap multiple times to try and get one image when he’s actually looking at the lens, or at least not mid-blink. But with the analog camera, we only allowed ourselves one shot – and the result was a much more natural portrait, catching him gazing off towards the street (probably distracted by another dog as usual!).
For this particular shot, I had the flash on, which you can see in the way the light bounces off his fur. With a short focal point, he becomes the clear focus, with the background elements gently blurred.
Festive lighting in lonely abandon
Next, we lingered a little longer around uphill Lincoln. Since our photoshoot was in December, the Christmas lights and decorations were in full glitter, but manifested with a slightly forlorn atmosphere as the wet weather kept most people tucked up in their living rooms.
It almost felt like a flashback to lockdown, pottering around the cobbled streets with barely a soul to share the scene. People often say we Brits are immune to the effects of the weather, but let’s be honest… sometimes the mildest drizzle is all it takes to keep us indoors!
Lincoln Steep Hill as a frame in time
For the final part of our photoshoot we wanted to capture a completely different perspective of Lincoln. But, en route to our chosen location, we stopped to take a few more snaps as we ventured down Steep Hill, the city’s independent shopping hub and a charming little scene that attracts people from far and wide.
As far as I can remember, Steep Hill has always carried an old-world aura, a spirit of a bygone time before chain-infested high streets became the norm in most towns and cities. Capturing the cobbled sloping lane in analog film vividly brings to mind what a scene of a 1970s row of English shops might look like.
Ironically, the first image I clicked focused on the Lincoln Imporium, which is the newest addition to Steep Hill having opened in October 2024. But, despite its recent arrival, the shop blends completely naturally into the retro scene.
This second, even more gloomy shot looking up Steep Hill might be the starkest example of how the analog camera captured the mood of the weather in Lincoln on that day, without any digital enhancement of the exposure.
The final photo I took within the upper area of Lincoln was one that connected me to some of my earliest memories of the city, as I captured it from outside the place where I went to college as a teen. The building that housed the old art college – which no longer exists – is just out of shot to the right of the image below.
This is a scene I saw almost every day more than a quarter of a century ago. After reflecting on how so little had changed in this view, it was time to take a journey back even further into my childhood memories of Lincoln.
The grittier side of Lincoln’s history
In the most formative years of my life, as a child and in my early teens, I lived on Kent Street, just off Monks Road – an estate sometimes known as Lincoln’s East End. The parallel with London’s famous sub-region is that it was once a thriving hub of industry, but has become more associated with poverty and social problems.
My family moved here when I was two years old, and I spent many days of my youth being outside, surrounded by old factories and power stations.
When people talk about Lincoln’s rich history, they usually default to the Roman or medieval roots that conjure the sense of a grand city. But it is the grittier, industrial legacy that represents the real Lincoln to me.
Rather than head directly to the Monks Road estate, we decided to take photos from a little further to the south, at the heart of the old industrial estate around Stamp End and Spa Road.
Gazing across a fenced-off wasteland from this spot, you can see the rows of terraced houses off Monks Road that were originally built around the early 1900s for factory and transport workers as the post-railway boom spurred housing growth in the city.
Even more strikingly, you can see an unobstructed view of Lincoln Cathedral from here – a perspective rarely shown in tourist photos or cosy paintings. You can see so many different faces of Lincoln in one image from here; the old factory-worker housing, the post-war high-rises that invoke more modern hardships, the graffiti tags of recent years, and the imposing, timeless structure of the 950-year-old cathedral in the distance, looking down on it all.
“The more things change, the more they stay the same,” goes the French proverb. If I try to picture what life was like when the cathedral was built, I imagine people living in poverty at the bottom of the hill looking up at this great, majestic palace of a building. And it’s still like that.
The apartment block that is clipped on the left of that image is Trent View House. There aren’t many of these high-rises around Lincoln; the few that exist stand companionless in their estates and are the exception rather than the norm. This one, like the others, has been there since I was little, and was another image I saw every day.
With only one shot left in the camera, we walked back up towards Stamp End, where the River Witham gurgles through a little lock. The buildings on the south side of the river at this spot have been there for over a hundred years.
I’m always fascinated by these old buildings, as they’ve never really been gentrified. Most have just stood still in time, and while some have been transformed into offices, the estate looks unchanged from when I grew up just a short distance away. I like that sense of familiarity and heritage.
The building you see across the lock was once the headquarters of Clayton & Shuttleworth, an engineering company established in the early 19th century. Part of the building was taken down at one point, hence you can only see “and Shuttleworth” in the lettering at the top, but that was well before my time!
An unexpected personal journey concludes
When we accepted the challenge to capture Lincoln through a vintage camera lens, I thought it would be a fun and creative challenge. It absolutely was, but I hadn’t quite anticipated the nostalgic personal journey it would involve.
Shooting your surroundings in analog is like rediscovering a lost perspective of the world you inhabit. I found this project a touching lesson in how important it is to pause, to be deliberate, and to be connected with your environment.
Fancy taking on a similar challenge yourself? You can find a range of vintage cameras on Not Quite North’s website, or visit their store at 23A Guildhall Street, just off Lincoln High Street.
What did you think of our photographic exploration of Lincoln through a retro lens? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
