Exactly, and I'm not expecting to get wonderful results straight away, it's a good few years since I used an SLR camera, and that was a purely mechanical one without all the fancy menus, which is why I said that you would get good results from a Box Brownie, as you're an astounding photographer.

Thank you, it's very kind of you! Funny thing is that I actually have a Kodak Brownie in my little collection of photographic equipments (left one in the picture below), but I never used it 

I think it's time you got some film and did so then.! 

Finding time is more problematic than finding the right films and developing them (although that certainly is a problem in itself as some processes are no longer available). Now that I am spoiled with the flexibility and immediacy of digital photography, I don't think I'll ever go back to analog, especially after having burned a lot of cash on films and prints during my early 20s, just before the rise of digital cameras.

That being said, there is definitely something very nostalgic about the (color) rendering and grainyness of old films that motivate people to still use them today (the other reason is cost in large-format photography, but that's a different subject entirely). I can't deny that I find the rendering of old Kodachrome and tri-X films very appealing and luckily Fuji cameras have settings that allow you to get direct outputs approaching that of old films (and there is a whole community sharing settings for all sorts of film simulations), which is good enough for me whenever I want to imbue my photography with a sense of nostalgia Not all subjects are suitable for that though.

I know what you mean about the cost of developing film.!
I burned through twenty rolls of film on a visit to Madurodam and Keukenhof in the late 80's.!!!

20 rolls... you certainly were not joking. My other issue with films is the consequence of the inevitably high scrap rate when you experiment and try different things to improve the shot, and I always do that, even to this day, improvement is a continuous process. So, for me film is definitely not a cost-effective medium.

I do that as well, and more than half of the shots I took weren't any good. 
I was using a very basic Pentax K100 and also some model of Fugi, the name of which I forget.

If your scrap rate is 50 %, then you're not experimenting enough. I get rid of about 90+% of the non-technical shots I take, which gets me results that I'm happy with at a given moment (over time I tend to spot more faults in the pictures I kept, and I have to fight the urge to retake them).

On the subject of old photographic gears, I find that the rendering of films is much easier to reproduce than that of old lenses. In this day and age of computer-aided optical design, manufacturers strive to perfect their lenses and remove all possible optical aberrations. That may make sense from a technical perspective, but that trend only makes lenses larger and heavier (more elements) and the photographic output more clinical. There's nothing quite like a strong spherical aberration and some parasitic light reflections from imperfect AR coatings to give some character to your pictures

All that discussion about photography makes me want to write a post bout electronic flashlamps... I may have an idea for an interesting and unusual lamp.

funnily enough I just stumbled upon that article (published today), which may interest you: How to Make Your Digital Photos Look Like They Were Shot on Film

Reading this made me think back to the 80's when I had a lovely old Yashica Mat-124G Twin-lens Reflex camera, wish I'd never sold it now, when I see what they go for these days 

Just thought I would share a picture of my 'Nifty Fifty' lens. 

Nice! Now let's see pictures taken with it

Since we're playing, here's my bokeh monster and photon hoover:

It's an Argus 35mm f/0.95 full frame lens (yep, you read that right), it weighs a ton but it can see in the dark and it gives an output with a medium-format flavor.

I think Photon might have something to say about being hoovered 

In October 2022 I used one of my two TLR cameras to shoot old PHILIPS fixtures in Pont-Saint-Esprit, in this case the Tele-ROLLEIFLEX with 135mm lens.