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A few weeks ago, while playing with my new digital Nikon D80, I started to feel nostalgic for my old, hefty, Nikon F2 ... the camera I shot most of my 8000 or so slides with for some 20+ years. I was wondering if the thing still worked. And, for my favorite lens, the Nikkor 85mm 1.8, which won't work with the newer N80 film and D80 digital cameras.
So I brushed it off, loaded up the F2 with some Tri-X 400 film, and took a hike thru our local cemetery, Oakland's fine Mountainview Cemetery, where all the Robber Barons are buried ... people whose last names we remember because streets and towns are named after them.
Black and white film seems to fit well against the granite stone of the cemetery. Static images, lots of symmetry, strong verticals and horizontals, strong shadows. Things I like.
I had no idea how these pictures would come out. Sending them out to a lab and waiting a week or so for the contacts and negative strips was nostalgic. Already I had fallen prey to the instant gratification of digital. But the wait for results is good because by the time you do get the contacts, your visual memory of taking those pictures has faded and you're able to look at them somewhat objectively, as if they were taken by someone else.
What concerned me most was whether or not the shutter screen was working properly. I've had the camera for about 30 years now, and somewhere in the middle of that lifetime it started to expose images unevenly. The camera slightly overexposed the leftmost eighth of the image. I had Nikon fix it (which left me without a camera for months, and set me back a pile of cash, as I recall.)
So I took some blank wall shots this time, just to see how the exposure was doing. And as you can tell, the camera is doing really well, considering it probably hasn't been used in over 10 years.
Out of the 36 exposures, about eight are worth sharing. I was mostly testing the camera, taking a variety of shots to see if it worked. I also remembered t reason why I moved on from the F2 to the N80 some 8 or so years ago: the Photomic thru-the-lens meter system had gone wonky and was not reliable. There was a bad connection in the linkage between the lens and the F-stop ring. So you would have to rely on a hand-held light meter most of the time. And, as expected, some of the shots on the roll were over and under exposed.
Another reason for finally abandoning my friend was the sheer weight of the thing. I still can't imagine that I carried this camera and lens around my neck and on my arm thru hikes in the Alps, protest marches in the streets, and knocking around with small children.
Still, it's good to stay in touch with the old technology. My digital Nikon D80 is an extremely fine camera, and I'm really enjoying using it. But it's with the mostly manual cameras like the F2 that you really learn about photography.
It's a keeper.
Some images from my cemetery walk are showing up on my photo blog All I've Seen http://rchrd.com/photo. You'll recognize the recent F2 images. They're the ones in striking black and white. And if you keep looking thru the images, eventually you'll get to the bulk of the F2 images taken between 1977 and 1999 or so. Let me know what you think of them.
