s/n 3971982 Black
Everyone likes the F3! Good for them, nice camera, great history, well supported, I had one and sold it and bought an F6. I’m not sad about the experience, it was a great camera to get to know. Not a good camera for me to reestablish my skill as a photographer. The information was digital, too digital for the manual camera experience that I didn’t understand that I needed at the time but I listened to my friends and bought one.
Everyone likes the F3! Good for them, nice camera, great history, well supported, I had one and sold it and bought an F6. I’m not sad about the experience, it was a great camera to get to know. Not a good camera for me to reestablish my skill as a photographer. The information was digital, too digital for the manual camera experience that I didn’t understand that I needed at the time but I listened to my friends and bought one.
As I oriented myself back into my photography, learning about lenses, focal lengths, aperture and modes, I realized the F3 was not the camera I needed. Neither was the F6 but the F6 was a far better camera for me regarding getting the photograph without being acutely aware of settings. The FE2 that I owned was a much better choice. As I got deeper into photography, the cost of film became a factor.
I bought a DSLR.
The D780 was a good fit for the lens collector that I had become. I just bought lenses to check them out. I bought a couple of lenses that were used to take iconic pictures. I wanted to see what these famous photographers like Steve Curry and Galen Rowell used to create their images. I had a bunch of AI-S lenses when I bought the D780. But not one auto focus lens.
Who does that?
Apparently I do. I thought I had rhyme and reason to my madness, that’s what I thought then but as I look back now, I was not efficient on my journey. I was on the path without a well defined goal. I knew I wanted to take good pictures and my keeper count was slowly increasing as I understood more and more about the exposure triangle but the camera mode I was using did not support manual control over my images. I was primarily stuck in P mode (program mode) where the camera did nearly everything for me.
Looking back, I was advancing to my goal but the destination continued to keep pace ahead of me. I understood the exposure triangle and all that was affected by it but I wasn’t doing it in manual, P or shutter priority modes.
A couple of the big camera houses came through town and I began to sell my manual focus lenses to buy D and G series auto focus lenses that I could share between the D780 and the F6. Eventually, those two cameras are all that I owned, I had sold all of my manual focus lenses.
I had made a mistake.
I got back into photography because I enjoyed the old cameras. I now was left with two beautiful cameras that took gorgeous photographs but the look and feel of an old but exquisitely manufactured metal and glass lens experience was gone. I missed the 50mm experiment of returning to my high school camera. So I searched out the Japanese pancake version of the AI-S lens, it was relatively inexpensive (and tiny) compared to the giant modern AF-S 200-500 f5.6 G that it sat next to on my shelf. But it was beautiful and offered a familiar view of what I wanted when composing a shot through it.
The Nikon FG I had been using as an everyday carry camera was cheap and feature packed. I sourced another one, cleaned it up and realized that cleaning an old camera was a good lesson but not something I really wanted to do. I could do it but it wasn’t the practice I wanted to do. I almost wasted a roll of film, I had cleaned the focus screen and ever so slightly misaligned it causing the focus distance to be off from what was indicated on the lens. It took 5-6 try’s to get it back in its frame and in the interim, I managed to mar the frosted surface of the screen. Every time I looked through the viewfinder, I was reminded of my troubling experience with the EM and with the row of the LEDs indicating exposure? That isn’t what I wanted in my manual focus experience. The FG was close…
I had fucked up again…
But I am learning and advancing in my skills.
What did I want in my manual focus experience?
A two needle match system of shutter and aperture, a viewfinder microprism ring with the center split focus. no more P ( fully auto) mode. I do want an Aperture priority mode where I choose depth of field and the camera chooses the shutter speed. Also, I want the ability to shoot fully manual. I choose both aperture and shutter speed by matching the needle indicators. In addition, the FE starts metering as soon as I shut the film back door. Believe it or not this is super important. Film is expensive to buy, process and scan, extra frames add up. The FE2 and F3 will not meter 0 and 00 frames, the camera internals choose a fixed shutter speed and that wastes those frames. I’m charged by the roll at development and scan services, 36 or 39 frames matters not to them, only to me.
The last thing is I much prefer the MD-12 motor drive over the MD-4 with the F3. The grip is more to my likening and this motor drive is aesthetically pleasing, the MD-4 is a brick.
Now you have it, the FE, more for less and I really like its looks.
Nikon MD-12 Motor Drive
s/n:
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