Sounds better on vinyl
Kevin picked up a lovely old Canon AE-1 camera for me in a pawn shop a couple of years ago, and I've been dabbling with it on and off since.
It's fully manual, so naturally results can be and have been hit and miss. But by now I've fairly well managed to figure out how aperture and shutter speed relate to each other, know how depth of field works, how to use the tiny lightmeter through the viewfinder, and have a sense for the type of light that works. I've also managed to figure out that shooting film is much different to digital. Not just in terms of results (although film obviously lends itself more to the types lucky breaks and happy mistakes that someone at my level usually relies on), but also in terms of the process. Film demands respect and consideration in a way that shoot-from-the-hip digital can't compare to. Crank the wheel and feel the film roll away under your thumb, then press the button to hear the most wonderfully satisfying sound in the world. Although a greater degree of inginuity may have gone into building the chips in my digicam, I myself certainly can't seem to muster the same sense of awe as for the precisison engineering that makes all of the mecahnical parts of the inside of my camera come together so delicately, perfectly audible in the falling-clicking sound of the shutter.
Digital is fun, but I love my AE-1.
More AE-1 at Flickr.
