The Mamiya C220 is a beast. Big, heavy, built like a tank, and about as far from a pocket camera as you can get. Mine was gifted to me by Robert McMillan, a dear friend and my old music master. I was over the moon because I wanted to shoot square medium format without spending stupid money, and I’ve been carrying it around Nantes, Paris, and the Vendée ever since.

It’s a twin-lens reflex, which means two lenses stacked on top of each other: one for taking the picture, one for the viewfinder above it. What makes the C220 unusual for a TLR is that the lenses come off. The full lineup runs from a 55mm f/4.5 wide-angle right up to a 250mm f/6.3 telephoto, with a 65mm f/3.5, the standard 80mm f/2.8, a 105mm f/3.5 (there are two versions of this one, a Tessar-type and a five-element Heliar/Dynar, some with a depth-of-field scale on the viewing lens), a 135mm f/4.5, and a 180mm f/4.5 in between. All of them are Sekor glass and all of them are sharp, with a character to the rendering I still haven’t got tired of. The 80mm is the one that lives on my camera. Standard field of view, does portraits, does street, does landscape, and I rarely bother swapping it out.

There’s no meter built in, so you’re on your own for exposure: a handheld meter, or these days a phone app. It’s an extra step and I won’t pretend it isn’t a faff sometimes, especially when the light’s changing fast, but it’s not a dealbreaker. You get used to it, and it slows you down in a way that’s not always a bad thing.

Focusing is manual too, via a knob on the side that racks the whole lens board forward and back. The waist-level finder gives you this odd, almost 3D view of the world, bright and clear even in poor light, but everything’s flipped left to right. Turn to follow someone walking past and you’ll swing the camera the wrong way at least the first few times. I still do it occasionally and I’ve had this camera for years.

Square format takes some getting used to as well. There’s no option to crop your mind into a rectangle later. You’re composing in a square from the start, and it changes how you see things. I noticed it most with buildings and street scenes in Nantes, in the Quartier Bouffay and around Place Cambronne, where a square frame forces a different kind of balance than a 35mm shot would.

Some of my favourite frames from this camera aren’t even in France. There’s a shot of the Île de Saint-Cado in Morbihan, Brittany, that still holds up as one of the calmest things I’ve made with it. Closer to home there’s a busker who used to play regularly on the streets of Nantes, a woman in a shop window, bicycles leaning against railings, vineyard vines out in the Vendée countryside, and a few of the Le Voyage à Nantes sculptures dotted around town. A trip to Paris gave me the Eiffel Tower twice over and a street scene near the river. None of it was rushed. You can’t really rush this camera.

People notice it too. Set this thing up on a tripod, or even just hold it at waist height and look down into the finder, and someone will wander over to ask what it is. More often than not it’s someone whose grandparents had one just like it, and you end up having a conversation about a camera instead of taking the photo you were aiming for. I don’t mind. It’s part of the experience.

It takes both 120 and 220 film, you just tell the camera which one you’ve loaded, and that’s the extent of the flexibility. There’s no interchangeable back, unlike some of its rivals, so no swapping mid-roll between colour and black and white. I’ve mostly shot mine on Ilford FP4 125 and HP5 Plus 400, and both hold up beautifully at 6×6, with far more detail in the negative than anything my 35mm cameras produce.

Despite the vintage look, this isn’t some ancient relic. The C220 dates from the 1980s, which in classic camera terms is practically modern. At 51, that decade doesn’t feel old to me at all, which possibly says more about me than the camera.

Here’s the honest verdict. It’s heavy at 1.3kg, slow to use, has no meter, and the reversed finder image will catch you out. None of that stopped me taking some of my favourite photographs with it. If you want a grab-and-go camera, buy something else, the Trip 35 or an X100F will serve you far better. But if you want a camera that forces you to slow down and actually look at what you’re photographing, and you don’t mind lugging a small tank around, the C220 rewards the effort. Expect to pay somewhere between $500 and $1000 depending on condition and which lens comes with it.

• Film format: 120 and 220
• Image size: 6×6 cm
• Lenses: Interchangeable Sekor lenses, 55mm f/4.5 to 250mm f/6.3 across seven focal lengths; 80mm f/2.8 is the standard
• Shutter speed: 1 sec to 1/1000 sec
• Metering: External only, no built-in meter
• Focus: Manual, waist-level finder
• Weight: 1.3 kg
• Price: roughly $500 to $1000 secondhand