{"id":30738,"date":"2022-01-15T09:37:17","date_gmt":"2022-01-15T08:37:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phillipreeve.net\/blog\/?p=30738"},"modified":"2023-06-20T13:07:18","modified_gmt":"2023-06-20T12:07:18","slug":"analogue-adventures-part-1-choosing-a-camera","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/phillipreeve.net\/blog\/analogue-adventures-part-1-choosing-a-camera\/","title":{"rendered":"Analogue Adventures – Part 1: Choosing a Camera"},"content":{"rendered":"

Introduction<\/h2>\n
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Agfa Isolette – roughly worth its weight in strawberries<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I shot analogue with two cameras in the past, a Nikon F80 and a Nikon FE2.<\/p>\n

The F80 is actually a very modern camera which supports AF, VR, matrix metering and a few other things, but the rubber got sticky and I got rid of most of my Nikon lenses quite some time ago, so I have little incentive to use it these days.<\/p>\n

The FE2 was better at giving the “analogue” feeling, but some parts of the mechanics are broken as the film advance doesn’t work properly. So on my first and only roll of film with this camera I ended up with a bunch of useless quadruple exposures.<\/p>\n

The adventure of analogue photography ended for me here.<\/p>\n

Until the day I was strolling through Stuttgart and discovered a camera store displaying a Nikon FM2, FM3a and F3 – all in mint condition and all – at least to my eyes – beautiful cameras. I got the idea of getting one of those, because: why not shoot some film for a change?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The F-mount Conundrum<\/h2>\n

But then I was looking at my lens cabinet and soon noticed the only lens I could attach to one of those cameras would be the Nikon 50mm 1.8 Series E (which I only kept for display purposes with the aforementioned broken FE2). A few years ago I shortly had a 50mm 1.2 Ai-s, but it couldn’t reach infinity so I sent it back within the return period. I love non-user-adjustable hard infinity stops on fast lenses…<\/p>\n

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Nikon FE2 with Nikon 50mm 1.2 Ai-s<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

So do I want to get a set of lenses for a Nikon F camera? Is there even a set of lenses for the analogue F-mount cameras available I actually want to shoot with? Neither is the case.
\nDavid got an OM film camera and some Zuiko lenses he used a few decades ago because he already knows those lenses and might even have an emotional attachment to them, but I can’t say that about any of the manual Nikon lenses.<\/p>\n

I also noticed that I actually do have<\/em> a bunch of M-mount lenses already – and thanks to Cosina, and some of the Chinese lens manufactuers that number is more like to increase rather than decrease – and most of them should work well on film, right?<\/p>\n

So I started to have a look at analogue M-mount cameras and I was in for a few surprises there.<\/p>\n

The unreliable, the expensive and the ugly<\/h2>\n
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Nikon F80 | Ektar 100 | Nikon AF-S 50mm 1.8G | f\/1.8<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

First I am talking about the cameras I wasn’t interested in and why – don’t expect me to be objective here, as getting an analogue camera in the first place was a questionably objective thing to begin with:<\/p>\n