I Love My F2


This is what my Nikon F2 would look like if I had bought it brand new the year it came out, 1971. Having just been born, I had very little money in 1971, and, being a baby, if I had had the money, I probably would have spent it on something brighter and shinier. My second or third hand F2 is "gently used," a phrase which means "everything still works, but it looks like crap." My F2 is covered with scratches, dents, and dings, and brass is showing through where the chrome has worn off. Any used camera dealer will tell you, however, that this isn't "damage"; it's "character".

Yes, to look at my camera, you'd think I'd lived a life of savage, Indiana Jones-esque adventure. My camera says I'd not think twice about dangling from a helicopter skid over an erupting volcano with one hand, while snapping one Pulitzer prize winning photo after another with the other. It says I'm drawn to fiery explosions, lurid crime scenes, and stalking elusive cannibalistic tribes through lush Amazonian rainforests, scoffing at the notion of "personal risk" as I squint rakishly at hell on earth through a split-image/microprism type K viewfinder.

My camera is, of course, a liar. I have no idea what dashing millionaire playboy/photographer rogue owned it before me, but the back yard is as exotic as my photo shoots have gotten. I don't know what sort of thing my camera was used to, but it now spends its days waiting for one of the dogs to sit still and look toward the camera, which can be hell on earth in it's own, less fiery, way. To a dog, a camera is a potentially tasty snack treat, so keeping them far enough away from the lens to take a picture is an effort in itself.

Sometimes I worry that my camera is bored. I worry that groans each time the shutter opens to reveal Dougal holding yet another tennis ball in his mouth. I worry that it makes snide, sarcastic comments to itself. "Oh look, another shot of the doggie. Way to go, Ansel Adams! You rock!" It could have once belonged to a private investigator and spent hours attached to a zoom lens, waiting in nondescript cars parked outside seedy motels to catch the twilight exodus of well-to-do philanderers with suspicious wives. It could have frozen in time the last death rattles of soldiers in 'Nam, or plumbed the murky depths to discover sunken Spanish galleons. Sometimes, I worry that my camera sits in the darkness of its deluxe padded camera bag dreaming of days of glory long since past and plotting to throw a spring or a gear to end its suffering. It hates me, I just know it.

But then, like a dog adopted from the pound, there's no way to really know where the camera came from or what's its seen in its past life. It's just possible that it acquired it's scarred, swashbuckling facade from being hauled around in a Midwestern grandmother's purse. Or it could have belonged to a clumsy wedding photographer, in which case the camera would be an embarrassment to me. It could very well be afraid of dogs, and lie awake trembling in its padded bag dreading another toothy close up of Dougal, in which case it would still hate me. We may never know.

Regardless of its feelings for me, I love my F2. Until it develops the complex motor skills and intelligence to file a restraining order, it will just have to live with me. Why do I love it so? To attempt to describe it's many attractive attributes would be to attempt to describe the beauty of Helen of Troy, or the vastness of space, or the flavor of Dr. Pepper. But I'll give it a go anyway.

Nikon has recently announced that it will stop making all but two of its film cameras, and completely discontinue making manual focus lenses. For a company that revolutionized photography, this is big news. Not only did Nikon invent the body style that is now typical of all 35 mm cameras, all Nikon lenses fit all Nikon cameras; Nikon is one of the only camera manufactureres that ever thought to do this, and it's one of the major reasons they've gained such a loyal following. A Nikon lens from 1959 will still work on a $4,000 Nikon digital model manufactured last month. Likewise, a new $6,000 autofocus lens will still work on my F2...only it won't focus automatically.

This is bad news, because it means if I wanted a new lens for my camera, I'd have to buy an autofocus lens. The autofocus feature won't work, but it would make the lens three times more expensive than it's manual focus counterpart. Since I've never really been able to afford new equipment anyway, this isn't really much of a tragic blow to me, but it does reinforce the notion that film cameras are going the way of the 8-track.

And that's why I love my F2. It embodies everything that's completely obsolete about film photography. It thinks a pixel is a woodland nymph, and attaching a flash to it is a hopelessly complex procedure that requires three cables and renders the camera inoperable with less than 4 hands. While most digital cameras are about as heavy as a travel pack of Kleenex, my F2 is over two pounds of solid neck fatiguing brass, and its near indestructibility has earned it the nickname "The Tank" by those in the know.

Any idiot can point and shoot a digital camera and end up with decent pictures. But there's no skill involved, no talent, no art. Likewise, any 35 mm film camera made after 1980 offers the same soulless ease. With an F2, there's no such thing as "point and shoot." By the time I've lined up a shot, there's often nothing left there to shoot. And that's the way I like it. We manual camera fanatics refuse to let our cameras do the thinking for us, even when it's to our benefit.

Take, for instance, the science of light metering. Modern built in light meters are ridiculously accurate and make knowing how to calculate exposure times and apertures a science as obsolete as Phrenology. So why do we refuse to use cameras that use them? It's all about control. A camera with a built in light meter will automatically adjust your shutter speed or your aperture, or, in many cases, both, and the user can't override these settings. What if you want a slower shutter speed for a slight blurring effect? What if you'd like a darker, moodier picture? The only way to go is manual.

Sure, you could digitally enhance a digital picture and get a picture that's both moodily lit and slightly artistically blurred, but that's cheating and we all know it. You'll find purists like me squinting at the dial of a Bakelite light meter hanging around our necks. We'll point the meter here and take a reading. Then we'll point it there and take a reading. Then we'll average to two readings and come up with a baseline exposure and aperture setting. Then we'll look up at the sky, stare at our subject, and scratch our heads. Then, after minutes of agonized soul searching, we'll recklessly decrease the f-stop without adjusting the shutter speed and snap the picture. Ha ha ha! The anarchy!

And did our settings work? Well, we can't tell you. At least not right away, especially if we don't have our own darkroom. If, by chance, we happen to be using black and white film, it will have to be sent to the one lab in America that still processes it. We'll know how everything turned out in about 2 weeks. We want none of the cheap, instant gratification of digital. It simply won't do. A good picture is worth waiting for because it's more than a good picture. It's confirmation that you finally know what you're doing.

With the passing of film cameras, so too goes the passing of an era where people were truly amazed by pictures. Nowadays, everything can be added or subtracted digitally, and being in the right place at the right time is now just a matter of aiming your camera phone. It's too easy. You don't have to know your subject. You don't need an appreciation of the way light behaves. You don't have to take the time to really see what the camera sees. And so the pictures we take now really don't say anything about us.

But not so with my F2. Every picture, regardless of how it comes out, is a labor of love. The fact that I've taken 20 minutes to set the shot up tells you that there's something in there that's pretty important to me. And the time I've taken waiting for the right photgraphic moment has given me a deeper apprectaion of the moments in between. Well, except the one time I was hanging out the window of a rental car, taking random shots of people on the side of the road. Those didn't say much about me. But they were funny. And blurry, too.