Nikon F: the end of the affair

It was a bit like what (I suppose) it might feel like to drive a classic sports car: other drivers would give it a second glance. For drivers read photographers. It's a very stylish camera. An icon. But I need to be hard headed, and it's just not up to the job. Long story short, when I bought it back in 2011 or thereabouts, I learned that the meter would have to be tweaked to function with modern batteries. It was sent away to Liverpool for that and a CLA. It came back with dust on the mirror which hadn't been there before, and (as I've eventually worked out) a meter leading to underexposure of about two stops.

It's all come to light in 2018, because it sat unused for several years, so I can hardly kick up a fuss with the technicians in Liverpool now. I don't even know if they're still in business. No one else is, apparently: camera repairers in Edinburgh and Glasgow didn't respond to my inquiries. I read somewhere you can send any Nikon back to the mothership in Japan for repair. I never followed that up, but would imagine with the postage and everything, there'd not be much change out of £100.

Or I could have a go myself, it doesn't look too mind-bogglingly difficult. But I'd have to buy tools, and a soldering iron, so I'd still be shelling out £50 or more for that, and whilst I do like fiddling around with old cameras, (it's incredibly relaxing), I can't see myself doing enought of it to justify investment in tools. And I wondered, if I got it all opened up, what if I found the diode to adjust the current had indeed been fitted by the Liverpool lads, then it would be a highly technical question: why had that not worked?

So then I thought, ok, I'll just get the eye-level prism for it, make it look even more stylish, a la Don McCullin in Vietnam. But it wouldn't have a meter, which would be ok about 75% of the time, but I'd miss 25% of my photos. Or (and clutching at straws now) I could just use it with flash, and the metering wouldn't matter. Silly sod, I really need to work with daylight a lot of the time.  And the eye level finder comes out at about £80 or more.

The bottom line is, even if I do find a technician I can trust (which I haven't) we're probably talking in excess of £100 to get it fixed. There are a lot of Fs on ebay for not much more than that, so I might as well have bought another one, but I don't want to go through all of this hassle, again, with the bloomin' meter.

The answer appears to be a Nikon F4s, which I can get for a couple of hundred quid or less. Flog the F, of course, and I'll probably take a hit on that because of the meter, but it's a question of cutting my losses and getting on with taking the photos I want to take. The F4s is ideal for that. In fact it looks like a brilliant camera.

The thing is with cross processing, do it with a pro camera, rather than fingers crossed. 25 years ago, a professional would have paid the equivalent of several thousand pounds for an F4, and I can get it for a tenth of that today.

Voila.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Leech or flatworm? Ants and Swiss Chard

"Chevy Chase. Fuck ever happen to him?"

How many pallets can you fit in the back of a Fiat 500?