Tag Archives: fe

I Really Want…

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Dangerous words for a photographer. Gear Acquisition Syndrome, as some call it, is a catalyst for stifled creativity.

I can’t shoot x because I don’t have y and z. Yes that’s zipped around my mind a few times and it’s never healthy.

At the moment it has entered my consciousness a little because this month’s photo club subject is ‘Unposed People’ and suddenly NONE of my cameras are suitable for street photography.

The Trip 35 isn’t accurate enough at focusing.
The Panasonic GF1 doesn’t have a decent viewfinder.
The D40 isn’t discreet enough.
I wouldn’t be able to focus quick enough on my FE.
The FM2n is manual exposure and I’ll miss loads of shots.
The Canon S95 is too slow.

All true statements but also utter bollocks. I ran two rolls of Superia 200 through the Trip on Saturday and it was perfectly acceptable. I’m obviously just looking for excuses.

I would however quite like a rangefinder camera. A Leica is way out of my price range but I would be more than happy with a Voigtlander R4A (*cough* it’s my birthday in June *cough*) and a 35mm lens.

For those that don’t know, a rangefinder camera has a small body, no internal mirror box and uses a focusing method unlike an SLR in that you don’t look through the lens. In the viewfinder there is a small patch in the middle which essentially has two images on top of each other. When you focus with the lens one moves across the other and when they are aligned the image is correctly focused.

Having no mirror box means that the camera can be smaller than an SLR and also allows for a shorter lens to film/sensor distance which in turn makes for smaller lenses.

Rangefinders can be a bit weird if you’re used to SLRs. Composing through a viewfinder which doesn’t show the actual framing of a shot that will appear on the film/sensor is disconcerting. There are frame lines in the viewfinder which give an approximation of your composition but if you use a lens for which there is no frame line, you’ll also need an external viewfinder. You could end up having to look through one finder to compose and one to focus. Not very fast then!

That said, pre-focusing can help for street photography and with a wide lens like a 21mm or 18mm the depth of field would be fairly huge – enough not to worry about focusing too carefully.

If I had the cash I would get a Voigtlander R4A, a 12mm and a 35mm and go shooting. As that would set me back a couple of grand I think I’ll make do with my £49 Olympus Trip!

Revitalised

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A new year, lots of new resolutions that last mere days. I didn’t bother with any as I don’t see an arbitrary point in time as the catalyst to start afresh.

Having trudged through January,

always the darkest and dankest month, and fought off bronchitis during February, now is the time to get back into my photography in a big way.

Whilst idle with bronchitis I did muster the energy to have a look through my camera kit and give some of the more used bodies a bit of a clean. Nothing major, just a few cotton buds to lift the dust buried in the cracks and grooves. My black FM2n bodies look clean and sleek whilst the FE is bright and shiny. The FE is still missing a screw, but then aren’t we all?

So what’s next? Well I’m going up to Nottingham in a couple of weeks so will no doubt take my FE and possibly an FM2n as well, so I can use two lenses without having to swap. The 50mm f/1.8 on the FE and the 24mm f/2 on the FM2n ought to do it. I shall probably stick with Ilford XP2 400 black and white film as it’s what I’ve got the most of.

I said I’d be getting back into it in a big way, didn’t I? Well maybe not that big, using just two SLRs and a few rolls of film, but it’s been so long since I did any proper shoots that this will feel big by comparison.

I also need to get back into street photography. The Olympus Trip 35 I have is perfect for that. It’s small, easy to use, discreet and super fast to shoot with. I’m thinking Trafalgar Square, the South Bank and the intermediary areas for some reasonably good shots to get me back in to the swing of things.

Normally this is a time where I would be pining for new kit, but who wants a Nikon D800 with hundreds of annoying menu items, buttons and far too many megapixels when an FE, a 50mm and a roll of film will more than suffice?

It’s alive!

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I bought a used Nikon FE recently for a mere £29. It had a “No guarantee” sticker and appeared to be faulty as it would only work on the 1/90 shutter speed and part of the prism, by the Nikon lettering, was out of line. Also, the light sealing inside the camera door had previously come away.

One new set of batteries and a new screw to fix the prism later and it was working ok. I’ve run a roll of Fujifilm Superia 200 through it and there is absolutely nothing wrong with it. The wind-on lever is a tiny bit loose but it doesn’t feel like it’s about to break or anything

The Nikon FE is ideal; it’s aperture priority, doesn’t get in your way and just lets you shoot. The meter is the best I’ve used, even more so than the F4 it seems, and I can see that it’ll get a lot of use.

In general use it’ll work best as a second body to my FM2Ns; the FE with a 50mm, 85mm or 135mm lens and an FM2N with a 24mm or 28mm. Wide angle on the FM2N for slower picture taking, i.e. to allow time to meter properly, and standard to telephoto for snapshots on the FE where I don’t have time to think about the shutter speed.

I’m intrigued to try the FE’s excellent meter against a roll of Fujifilm Velvia slide film as I’ve had nothing but trouble with it in the past.

Have you found a bargain that’s worked out to be one of the best camera buys you could have hoped for?

 

Photo of Nikon FE used under the Creative Commons licence. Original, taken by Mike Odoño, available here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ingredienterb/3844439066/

The ultimate camera

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I’ve already talked about the perfect lens and how it doesn’t exist.

Now I’ve been thinking about the perfect camera which only exists in my head but I think is worth sharing.

Body

The body would be an SLR as it’s my favourite form of camera. As much as I love rangefinders, TLRs, and mirror-less digital compacts, SLRs just make the most amount of sense to me. Having bought two of them, they’re that good, I would use the FM2 as the base.

Mount

Since I’m talking about a Nikon body, it would have to be the F
mount. I toyed with the idea of an interchangeable mount to allow the use of
Canon EF and FD, Nikon F, Pentax K, Olympus OM and, if possible, Leica M
lenses but although this is a fictional camera I just don’t think it would be
possible to do.

Light Capturing Medium

Sorry folks – it would be digital. I love it dearly but if I had this camera there would be no need for 35mm film ever again. The Leica M9 uses a Kodak 36x24mm, 18 megapixel sensor and I would use the same specs but get Sony to make it, considering the excellent job they did of the Nikon D700 and Pentax K7 sensors. Additionally I would refrain from including an anti-aliasing filter on the sensor. They’re only useful for preventing moiré patterns and you lose some sharpness in the process.

Lenses

I’ve said above that I would have a Nikon F mount, so basically it would be compatible with virtually every Nikon lens ever made. That means non-AI, AI, AI-S, AI-P, AF-I, AF, AF-D, AF-S and even those odd ones that require mirror lock up.

Nikon made the leap to lenses with no aperture ring in the late ’90s/early ’00s and if this ultimate camera were to be just that, it couldn’t possibly restrict the use of G series (i.e. no aperture ring) lenses. Therefore I would add a control wheel on the back where your thumb would usually rest that allowed the changing of the aperture. A simple readout in the viewfinder would indicate the selected aperture.

All lenses attached regardless of features would operate as manual focus. Auto
focus requires too many extra electronics and if not using AF-S or AF-I would also necessitate a built-in screw focusing motor.

Sensitivity

Since I love long exposures in daylight and handheld photography in low-light, I would set the base ISO at 25 and the upper limit to 6400. There would be no gimmicks to increase the ISO above 6400 into the HI-1 or HI-2 range. The ISO settings would be changed by a control wheel where the current film winder handle is on the FM2.

Shooting Modes

The camera would work in the same way as the Nikon FE does. Set the shutter speed dial to AUTO and it works as aperture priority. Otherwise it’s manual. I don’t need or want shutter speed priority.

Viewfinder

The viewfinder would show 100% of the field of view with no unnecessary magnification. I would use a bright focusing screen configured for a maximum aperture of f/1.2. The surround of the viewfinder would display the aperture, the shutter speed, the ISO and a meter needle similar to that of the Nikon FE but lit up for night work.

Screen and Controls

I would use a 2 or 3-inch OLED screen depending on how well it would fit into the FM2 type body. On the back would be four buttons laid out vertically along the left hand side, for the menu, 
reviewing and deleting photos, and for white balance. This is
 the only setting I would have that uses the screen to alter. Whereas the 
aperture, shutter speed and ISO settings are all physically on the body, I 
find white balance is the thing I set the least on my digital cameras.

On the right hand side of the camera I would have a five-way button layout 
similar to the Panasonic G1, where there is a set/ok button surrounded by
 four directional buttons. On the Panasonic each one of these also acts as 
a way of changing a setting when not in the menu, but since everything is set 
physically on the lens or the ISO and shutter speed dials there would be no 
need to add extra features to these buttons.

Memory

As this would be a digital camera, there has to be scope for storage of 
the digital media. I considered a solid state hard drive of 64 or 128GB but I
 think SD cards are the way to go. The iPad has a camera
 connection kit to allow SD cards to be plugged in – it would be great to shoot on this type of camera and then review, edit and share photos using the iPad.

I would have dual SD card slots on the underside of the camera next to the 
li-ion battery, under a removeable plate. Some modern DSLRs can use two cards, 
one for raw images and the other for JPEGs or one as a backup. I would use one card as a backup to the other and only shoot JPEG.

Picture Controls

These are massively important if the camera is going to
 output JPEGs. Virtually all DSLRs have some form of picture style control but
 rather than have a selection of modes with “Natural”, “Smooth”, “Vibrant” and
 Dynamic”, for example, I would include real life films as templates. I love
 the idea of being able to select “Fuji Velvia 50″ with one shot and
 “Ilford Delta 3200″ with the next. The ISO rating of the camera could be 
set automatically to allow the same sensitivity which could then be over-ridden 
by setting the ISO control dial.

Flash

The camera would have a hot shoe but only configured to fire a flash
gun that’s mounted, i.e. using the center pin. I would want no i-TTL flash
 metering, certainly no pop-up flash, but would have a PC sync socket for 
PocketWizards etc. I know this makes it more complicated, but by having i-TTL 
you have to include menu items or buttons for flash exposure compensation, 
rear curtain/red eye reduction/slow sync modes, flash shutter speeds and the 
like.

Menu

The menu would be kept incredibly simple:

  • Date and time
  • SD card format
  • Picture control selection
  • File format selection
  • Noise reduction toggle

These are all I could think of, though there are probably one or two others
that should be added.

Misc

To round things off, I would have no live view and no USB port. There’s no 
need to have either as live view just drains a battery and a USB port requires 
unnecessary extra electronics and a port on the side of the camera. Don’t 
people have card readers anymore?

Finally I would love the option to limit the camera to 36 exposures with a set 
picture control, i.e. film style, to make it feel like a film camera. After 
the 36th exposure it would reset and allow the film style to be changed.

So there we have it. I would set a price of £1,000 (and since it’s my camera I
would have one for free!) and make millions.