Penmachine

I said I'd show you the first photos with my new/old Nikon F4 film camera. Here they are. Just for extra retro appeal, my first roll of film was black and white, using an expired roll of Ilford XP2 film:

I took all of them with a single fixed-length prime lens, my Nikkor 50 mm f/1.8, the kind of lens all cameras used to come with.

P.S., I told you the camera was big. But it really is a marvel of electromechanical engineering—the promo materials say it has more than 1700 parts, including the clever tiny LCD and LED panels inside the camera body showing exposure information.

I'm sure modern cameras have a variety of equally interesting stuff, but what's cool about the F4 is that it's designed to be disassembled so you can actually get at the guts. The focusing screen, shutter, mirror, film winding mechanism, and so on are all easily visible, so it's much easier to understand what the camera is doing when you take a picture.

Labels: film, geekery, nikon, photography