Middle age

There comes a point where one has to come to terms with a shift in perspective, a sea-change in motivations.

This is it.

Last week, I bought an Nikon F5 and a Nikkor 24-85mm AF VR zoom. I mention the letters... well I'll come back to that. In my defense, I paid less in inflation adjusted dollars than I did for my Olympus OM-1n in 1980¹. And I didn't even have a job then...

It gradually dawned on me that I have no real photographic use for the camera. I don't shoot much 35mm; if I want good images, I have 4x5 for really big files, and 6x7 if I want quality with something I can walk around with. 35mm delivers less in terms of resolution than my 10MP Lumix LX7 (which I really like). I don't need 8 frames per second (which translates to $4.50 worth of TMX100 in three seconds) or 1/8000^th of a second shutter speed; I can even work a rewind lever; you can do it quite easy
If you have any strength in your thumb.

While I do enjoy the process of developing film, that's mostly nostalgia and comes with a penalty; digitally spotting the negatives, which is not that much less tedious than doing it with a paint brush - as on many an evening I watched Derek doing years ago. Anyway, I've already got two very nice and easy-to-use Olympus OM-SP2s that I've had for years were I really going to go back to shooting 35mm. Given that film is getting more and more expensive, I began to wonder what on earth I'd done (or more precisely why I'd done it).

The only reason one is left with that isn't self-justifying post-hoc rationalization is that I'm buying as a collector rather than a photographer. I've always had a bit of a hankering for the F2. I nearly bought one ten years ago at auction (though in hindsight I'm quite glad I didn't). And the F5 I found is a very nice example of Nikon's last heavy duty film camera; not a mark on it. It's got a host of features that presage the flexibility of digital cameras (most of which I probably won't ever use). My MO, where available, is almost always aperture priority, even on the LX7 so P and S aren't of much interest, though M I will need for flash. Double exposure I did and got bored with 30 years ago. I'm too cheap to bracket, and I don't want to spend $240 on a card reader to get the EXIF data out of the camera, though I would if I could find a cheaper way of doing it.

There are some things though, that my older 35mm equipment doesn't have and these may lead me to pick up this camera to take pictures. First, the auto-focus appears to be very precise and while I'm not too lazy to turn the focusing ring by hand, it does mean one thing less to have to do before pressing the button; much more point-and-shoot-like. And it's extremely fast so I don't miss the shot with a moving subject while trying to keep it in focus. That the AF piece.

The other is VR. The only vibration reduction device I've used on a film camera is a tripod. Though I've not yet run a roll through the camera (the lens only arrived today) it's going to allow me to use slower, finer grained film. My current preference is for TMX 100.

Some other nice touches on the body are the built in winder, the automatic setting of the film speed (no more "duh! I forgot to change the ASA"), really easy film loading, a little window in the back so that you can see the film canister that's actually in the camera (avoiding having to stick ends to film cartons into the slot on the back), and a very comprehensive digital display in the viewfinder. All in all it's a very well thought out camera with lots of touches to make ones life easier.

One thing that did surprise me is that the viewfinder is much smaller than the OM-SP2 or the FE. Clearly a design decision was taken somewhere that you had to move your eye too much to take in the entire filed so viewfinder have gotten smaller. I'm not sure I like the smaller viewfinder but we'll see.

I want to pay tribute to Nikon's designers and management for the attention they paid to backwards compatibility. It would have been easy (and almost certainly cheaper) to build new products that weren't constrained by earlier design choices. But starting with the transition to AI lenses in the 1970s, allowing users to preserve their investment in lenses when upgrading bodies and vice-versa, this was, and clearly still is, a central design tenet (and one by the way that IBM didn't understand until it cancelled the FS project at the 11th hour).  So the 24-85mm lens that Nikon only announced in June last year works perfectly on a body the company stopped making nearly 10 years ago. The other side of the coin is that Nikon's design and engineering teams must have had a very long product road map and designed current products with future ones in mind.  In this day and age of built in obsolescence, disposable products and computer software which won't work on last years operating system, that's something to which I think we've become quite unaccustomed.

So although this is really more of a collectible that a tool, for a while at least, it may be my nearest film based alternative to the LX7 (though it's clearly not quite convenient or discrete).

1. I paid £125 for my OM-1n, which I bought used in 1980 from Fox Talbot in Hammersmith. Adjusting for inflation and exchange rates, that's between $644 and $846, depending on whether you apply UK inflation to the pound and then do the exchange at today's rates, or do the exchange at 1980 rates and then apply US inflation. Averaging the two gives $746, more than the $715 I paid in total for a 'new (other)' lens on eBay and an E+ used body from Adorama.