In a digital world, why would anyone still shoot film anymore?
Film slows you down. Film may be cheep, but just knowing that you only only have 36 shots inside your camera at a time makes you think differently. You look at the image in your viewfinder the way a painter looks at his canvas, making sure that all the various pieces of the composition are just where you want them to be. You make sure that your exposure is correct, and then you take one shot and move on to another subject.
With manual cameras, the tactile feedback of handling something mechanical with knobs, levers and gears makes you feel like you are communicating with your machine at a personal level.
My F3 with one of my newest lens acquisitions, a used, but almost mint Nikkor 50mm 1.4 AIS.
In the mid 1990s, One of the many things I considered in my lost years fresh out of college was to go pro with my photography, which I never did. I was looking into newspaper careers. I wanted to be Weegee. I was a gearhead, I bought everything, I thought that "real" photographers looked something like Dennis Hopper in "Apocalypse Now".
During this time, the professionals and the amateur gear freaks had been trading in their Nikon F3s for the new F4s for four or five years, so, a lot of used F3s were in the camera stores even while Nikon was still making new ones. They were everywhere, so, I bought one. I also got a motordrive, a lenses, a ridiculous telephoto zoom for taking pictures of birdies from a mile away, and a big press style camera bag to carry all that crap in. My whole kit sent me to the chiropractor on a regular basis. Also, I had a Banana Republic safari vest with a stupid number of pockets to complete the mister photographer guy look. I still have the bag, the vest, and the birdie lens.
The Banana Republic vest was made back in the 1980s when Banana Republic actually sold cool looking safari shit. Hell, they even had pith helmets. Then they were bought out by The Gap who turned the outfit into another mainstream preppy brand. Somebody needs to buck that trend, the world doesn't need more clones of J.Crew, the world needs more people wearing pith helmets.
The F3 was the Nikon flagship pro camera from 1980 to 1988, when it was superseded by the mighty F4. The F3 still remained in production until 2001 when the F5 was being sold. With a 21 year production run there are many, many out there on the used market today for really good prices. Even the ones that look beat up more than likely work just fine. I bought mine used sometime between 1993 and 1995. According to the serial number, it was already a 10 year old camera at the time I bought it and it has been my favorite camera for twenty years since. So, why am I still shooting a camera that is 30 years old?
It's gorgeous. The F3 is a masterpiece of industrial design. To create it, Nikon recruited designer Giorgetto Giugiaro who's portfolio includes a long list of automobiles including the original Volkswagen Golf, the DeLorean DMC-12 , and the Lotus Eprit.
Nikon hasn't changed it's basic lens mount since 1959, so any Nikon lens between then and now except for (G) lenses will mostly work on the F3.
This is the camera photojournalists used to take into war zones. It was made for people who had to get the shot, get it fast, and then get out of the way of the flying bullets. The body is a hunk of solid metal. The design is modular; an insane number of interchangeable prisms, film doors, and focusing screens were made for it. The film advance lever has ball bearings and is smoother than any other I have ever tried. The electronic shutter is nothing short of reliable, just keep a pair of extra button batteries in your camera bag. You'll need them eventually, but they last a long time.
It has every feature you can imagine you might need in a manual film camera, and everything is done with nice big levers, switches and dials...like a real camera. It has 80 percent center-weighted metering as apposed to the 60 percent on most cameras which makes it easier to pick out what part of the scene you want to meter without having an actual spot meter. Both the DE-2 and DE-3 prisms allow you to see 100% of what ends up on the film, as opposed to the 80 or 90 percent in a typical SLR, and the viewfinder image is absolutely huge. With the depth of field preview, all of this makes the F3 a great tool for fine art photography.
The Camera is only close to perfect, though. The flash sync is only at 1/80, which might be a turn-off for some, but it doesn't bother me, I almost never use flash. The flash shoe is weird, but, more on that later. Your shutter speed and a (+-) exposure guide is read digitally in the viewfinder with a small LCD. In low light, you can press a small, hard to use button to light up the LCD enough to barely read it, or you can just keep it in aperture priority in low light like I do.
The most common prism, the DE-3, or high-eyepoint finder, which is labeled with the letters HP, allows you to see everything while wearing glasses. An F3 sold with the DE-3 was designated the F3HP. With it, you to stay in the middle of the action without having to press the camera into your face and squint hard into the viewfinder. Since I shoot without glasses, I don't find much difference with the older DE-2 prism which lowers the camera's profile slightly.
When the F3 was designed, Nikon had not yet figured out how to put a regular hotshoe on interchangeable viewfinders, so the F3 has a freaky flash shoe over the rewind crank. TTL flash exposure is provided by the special Nikon SB-12 speedlight. It's a really nice lightweight flash that can be folded flat and put in a coat pocket.
In continuous mode, The MD-4 motordrive burns through a roll of film in the blink of an eye. It also takes 8 AA batteries and makes your camera feel like it weighs about fifty pounds. I don't use it anymore.
All photos:
Camera: Nikon F3:
Lens: Nikkor 50mm f1.8
Kodak BW400CN
This one I cropped slightly
This is a re-shoot of a photo I posted earlier
This one had a bright leaf in the top of the frame that I did not like, so I used the burn tool in Photoshop to remove it.
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