Twenty-seven bucks for this professional-caliber 35mm SLR with more features than I will ever be able to use. The shutter and overall durability of the F3 is superior though.A sure sign that we live in remarkable times: I bought this Nikon N90s body, which retailed new for anywhere between $700 and $1000, for just $27. It’s of course much smaller and I think much easier to use in this regard. I think the FE2 would really sit well with you. I still own my F3 and use it almost exclusively in aperture priority mode in situations where I don’t need a meter, because outside of this, it’s a very fine piece of equipment. After buying an F3 as my first F body, I reverted to the F2 which has many more meter/head options. What surprises me is how an improved read-out was never even offered. It’s certainly not as fast to read, even in broad daylight, as a big swing needle or simple 3 LED’s. Engaging the light each time you want to meter in low light seems ridiculous for a 1980’s meter as it slows one down and the display is still very small anyway.
NIKON F90X VS F3 ISO
It’s not clearly visible without the added light past about 800 ISO situations. To get my newsletter with previews of what I’m working on, click here to subscribe!įor me, the Achilles’ heel of the F3 is that dim little LCD meter display. To get Down the Road in your inbox or reader six days a week, click here to subscribe! If I see more of this, I’ll move the camera up in the CLA queue and include a repair to the shutter. This is a good reason to use up some ten-year-expired Kodak Max 400 I have in the fridge. I’m going to shoot a few more rolls through my F3 to see if the problem recurs. I had been using my F3 regularly until about a year ago, when Operation Thin the Herd began. It’s possible that the shutter was just a little crabby from disuse. On my first roll it affected about a dozen shots, but did not occur at all on the second roll. I didn’t know it until the images came back from the processor, but the shutter was acting up a little. We shared a bottle of delicious Spanish wine.Īll was not perfect with the F3 on this outing. I made a portrait of Margaret at our Sunday lunch, at a restaurant called The Dearborn. I managed one photo inside the Merchandise Mart before security sternly warned us that photography was prohibited. The F3 is quiet for an SLR perfect for shooting inside a museum like the Chicago Art Institute. I haven’t even begun to exhaust the obvious subjects yet. I love Chicago as a photographic destination. By the third day I was beginning to wish for relief. The F3 hung off my shoulder nonstop for three days. The P3200 let me shoot at comfortable apertures for plenty of depth of field. Heavy cloud cover made for poor light during the day.
I just can’t get over how good these night photos are. I really enjoyed being able to capture the city at night on that fast, fast film. These are from our December trip to Chicago. The lens is the 35mm f/2.8 AI Nikkor, and the film is Kodak T-Max P3200. So here now, the photos that would have graced that Operation Thin the Herd post. But it is silly to keep you in suspense through a long post when I’ve always known there was no way I would get rid of this camera.
This was going to be my Operation Thin the Herd writeup on the F3. That kind of bonding has happened for me with only a few cameras, my FA not included. I own one, an FA, and it’s a good camera - and less fatiguing at the end of a long day slung over the shoulder.īut it took me no time to adapt to the F3’s ways, and now whenever I shoot it I feel one with it. One could argue that I might enjoy one of Nikon’s lighter semi-pro bodies more. The F3 offers aperture-priority exposure, my favorite way to shoot. I’m ready for pretty much anything I might want to shoot. I own a good range of capable Nikkor lenses. After I send it out for a CLA, it should work beautifully for me for the rest of my life. The rugged Nikon F3 can withstand any conditions I might subject it to, including my own considerable klutziness. There would be times I wished I could slip my Olympus XA into my pocket, or enjoy a Kodak Retina.īut if I owned only my Nikon F3, I’d make wonderful images for the rest of my life, and be perfectly happy doing it. Once in a while I’d pine for my autofocus, autoexposure Nikon N90s. I’d miss my other SLRs, especially my Pentaxes ME and KM. I think I’ve tried enough cameras now to make this judgment. My camera collecting has been, in part, a journey toward finding the cameras that work best for me. It’s a bold statement, I know: if I could own only one camera, it would be the Nikon F3.