Category Archives: Photography

Nikon F100

Film, Nikon bodies

Culmination of a film odyssey.

For an index of all my Film related articles, click here.

Spurred on by a friend who is an enthusiastic film user, I determined that a logical approach to finding the right combination of film hardware, services and EXIF software was called for. The market is bursting to the seams with lightly used film cameras available at scrap prices and the renaissance enjoyed by film itself is reflected in the number of labs offering processing and scanning services along with a growing number of emulsions after the nadir of a few years ago.


My film body odyssey – Nikon FE, N90S and F100.

Hardware:

The choice of brand was simple. I have some two dozen F-mount Nikkor lenses, mostly manual focus with AI conversions and chips installed by me. A few are newer AF optics though as recent pieces here have shown, the old lenses are generally superior to the more recent ones, and at lower cost.

Bodies are insanely cheap and there is no earthly reason to save a few dollars by buying a beater, when mint examples can be had for little more. The early metered bodies from the FE/FM series, known for their toughness, can be found for around $100 so I started with a Nikon FE, a small and ergonomically superb offering, far more robust than contemporary Leicas with their rangefinders fading and all sorts of alignment issues, along with rotting rubber shutter blinds where Nikon uses titanium. And at 10% of the cost of those Leicas, what’s not to like? Mine ran me $100 plus $30 for a better focus screen. The FE falls naturally to hand and I had a blast using it but I found that the absence of a focus confirmation LED in the finder was a feature sorely missed by my aging eyes. Use a lens f/2.8 or slower, even with the improved FM3 focus screen installed, I was never quite sure critical focus had been established and was often sawing the focus collar back and forth to get there.

Thus the next step was to find a Nikon film body with autofocus which, with a manual Nikkor fitted, conferred the advantage of that confirmation light. Along came a Nikon N90s, another body renowned for its durability and costing a whopping $50 in the original box, no less. Heavier than the FE owing to the focus and film advance/rewind motor, the body is a delight to use with AF Nikons or unchipped MF ones, but the aftermarket chips installed by me on every one of my manual focus Nikons refuse to communicate with the body’s exposure meter and are thus useless. With AF Nikkors the body works perfectly. The only known issue is a tendency for the chintzy coating on the back to degrade and get sticky, but my body came with that removed, exposing the black plastic underneath. Isopropyl alcohol is the indicated solvent here and the result looks fine, matching the finish of the rest of the body.

So a better mousetrap was called for and it came along in the guise of the Nikon F100, meaning the $200 I splashed out wildly on the mint body and high capacity battery grip was financed by the proceeds of sale of the FE, the N90S and the F100’s battery grip which does little for this occasional snapper other than adding needless weight and bulk.

The F100 is superb in every way. The body takes four AA batteries like the N90s, disposes controls in a manner almost identical to those on my favorite digital body, the D700 and comes with an eyepiece diopter adjuster built in which is a boon for non-stock eyesight. With four AA cells installed in the body holder the external battery holder with its 6 AA batteries can be dispensed with leaving a body barely heavier than the N90S. Unlike with the FE and N90s you cannot change the focus screen, but you do not need to. The focus confirmation light works perfectly. The apertures of my MF Nikkors are correctly registered by the metering system with aperture priority exposure automation. That’s a huge deal as I have many and they are all here to stay. And the F100 focuses AF Nikkors very fast. Weaknesses? Rumored to be very tough on batteries, but no problem for a ‘one film a week’ guy, plus they are common and inexpensive AAs. The earlier bodies had a fragile rewind fork – you can identify it easily as it’s pointed. If your body’s s/n is greater than 21673xx you will find that the spigots on the rewind fork are now squared, not pointed, and much more robust. (The s/n is engraved black on black underneath the bayonet mount at the base). Finally, the perfect body, though the sensual pleasure of the FE’s manual film advance is gone.

In addition to the fragile rewind fork on earlier bodies (unlikely to be an issue with lightly used bodies), the only other issue with the F100 I have noted on chat boards is with the automated start and rewind of the film.

It appears that if you set Custom Settings to thread the film when the door is closed, and to rewind it after the last shot, the system can fail and start rewind part way through the roll. I believe the mechanism Nikon uses to determine when to start automated rewind is simply to measure the current demand of the advance motor. When the film is at the end, the current demand spikes and the advance motor goes into reverse and commences rewind. But a like current demand – triggering a false ‘end of film’ indication – can occur with a stiff cassette spool and/or a tight felt trap, which would simulate the ‘end of roll’ condition part way through the roll

Custom Settings are set thus:

The two Custom Settings for automated film loading and rewind are 8 and 1, respectively:

You want to make sure these are both set to ‘0’, the default setting, thus defeating the automation.

To manually commence rewinding the film at the end of the roll you simultaneously depress the ‘BKT’ (top left) and the ‘+/-‘ buttons (top right). (In the later D700 this button pair formats the CF storage card. Neat.) Each is marked with a red symbol.

The other Custom Setting to note concerns the use of the lens’s aperture ring to set aperture rather than using the front top wheel (sub-command dial), custom setting #22:

This is essential to enable aperture ring control for my MF chipped Nikkors as I cannot control the setting of the aperture using the sub-command dial, and as I also much prefer to use the lens’s aperture ring. So my Custom Setting #22 is set to ‘1’ and all my old lenses work properly.



By the time the F100 was made, Nikon’s design layout was pretty much firmed up.
The much later D700 is on the left.

Processing and scanning:

No one in his right mind wants film strips returned. A high quality scan of the processed film is what is called for and as mass scanner quality has peaked, holding on to film strips in the hope of better scans down the road is a quixotic approach. After a couple of false starts with labs in California, I found that Sharpprints.com, in Wisconsin of all places, was just the ticket. Excellent processing with high attendant volume assures fresh chemicals, complemented with high definition scans from their Noritsu scanner. Further, downloads are available fast and there are no downloading issues. And they are almost 40% cheaper than the uncaring and unresponsive coastal labs – $14 versus $22.50 a roll. The limitation is that this lab only processes color film requiring C41 chemicals (color negative emulsions), and does not process E6 color slide stock. They also process TriX and other monochrome film in Kodak HC110 developer.

EXIF data:

Other than telling you the scanner manufacturer’s name, no EXIF data is present on scanned film files. I find such data to be essential as I tend to search for images in my catalog by camera body and lens used. Thus I resort to a $10 application named ‘EXIF Editor’, available in the Apple OS X App Store.

It’s a tad clunky but can be integrated into LR for the roundtrip in Lightroom->Preferences->External Editing:


EXIF Editor set as an external editing option.

Batteries:

The F100 has something of a reputation as a battery eater. My body came with the auxiliary battery holder which holds 6 AA batteries rather than the 4 in the body’s handgrip. The latter must be removed when the auxiliary MB-15 holder is attached – see the first image in this article. The battery holder appears to add 40% capacity based on Nikon’s data:


Note the greatly increased power draw with big, long lenses
like the 80-200 f/2.8 AFD zoom – lower section, above.

I immediately sold my battery holder ($50) as it adds weight and bulk out of proportion to its sole utility value which is the addition of a vertical shutter release. You don’t need it. Further, cheap lithium batteries are now abundantly available – I paid $1.50 per cell at Amazon, and the table above suggests no one needs the external holder. If you must change batteries fast, new in-body Nikon MS-12 AA battery holders remain available for under $25 – in fact I had to buy one as it was missing from my body. Simple pre-load one with batteries of your choice and keep it in your pocket.

* * * * *

The results of this discovery process:

  • Three business days from mailing to availability of high quality downloadable scans.
  • The charm of using analog film in a digital world, with all the attendant benefits and challenges.
  • Properly EXIF indexed data files in my Lightroom catalog.
  • Negligible financial outlay.

More film, another lab

Film, Photographs

Trust is the issue.

For an index of all my Film related articles, click here.

I mentioned that after the debacle with the first processing lab I tried that I had sought out two more which offered processing, high quality scanning and online download of the scanned images.

The first I tried was Sharprints.com in Wisconsin, and it proved to be excellent. Fast, meaning 3.5 business days from mailing to download, quality work and all promises met. Bare bones, maybe, but that’s all I need. That and promises made being kept. Click the link for more details.

The other lab I tried, ProPhoto.com in Irvine, CA came with the usual flakiness associated with large coastal city operations, just like the execrable TheDarkroom.com, also in the Golden State. Emails were not replied to, statements that the download was ready were false, calls resulted in infinite hold times and the process took 4.5 business days, which is mystifying given that Irvine, CA is but 384 miles from my home whereas Eau Claire, WI is 1,712 miles distant. Based on comparative performance and honesty and clarity of communications, I recommend Sharpprints.com in WI for film processing, scanning and download. Price is also a factor – $14 for the WI lab, $22.50 for the one in CA. One roll of Kodak Ektar 100 was the test in each case.

Here are some snaps from the latest film foray, in downtown Phoenix. Hardware was again the Nikon FE with the 43-86mm f/3.5 Zoom Nikkor:

A tale of two fifties

Nikon lenses

Plastic fantastic and the Real Thing.


The AF on the left, the Real Thing on the right. 5.6 oz with AF against 7.2 oz without.

There really is no earthly reason why lenses encased in plastic or resins should be any worse than their metal enshrouded predecessors. On impact plastic is more likely to ‘give’ than dent, and the attendant benefits of light weight and durability are non trivial. Plastic bodies get glossy with wear, whether on a camera or lens, but retain their black finish, unlike plated or anodized metal. And nearly all of today’s Nikons use tough and light crinkle finish resins in the G series optics which are optically the best there is at any price. I own one of these, the Nikkor 35mm f/1.8G AF-S DX lens, a 50mm FFE for the APS-C Nikon D2x, and it is excellent optically and durable mechanically. It shows barrel wear in an understated manner. And look at any old, maltreated metal era Nikon with a scalloped focusing ring where the black anodizing has worn off and you have something really ugly on your hands.


It does not get much uglier than this.

But show me an unsullied original of that metal era wonder and I will show you mechanical beauty from an era when lens design and execution reached new peaks, peaks largely emanating from Nippon Kogaku, Tokyo.

The 50mm AF (pre-D) Nikon shown above is a product of the 1990s and I can only think times must have been especially hard at the factory in Tokyo. The design of the plastic barrel is simply awful, devoid of ergonomics or artifice, and Nikon has abandoned its gorgeous engraving of numbers on the lens to screen printed paint, which eventually simply rubs off. This design awfulness extends to many lenses in the AF/AFD era, all using the competent if somewhat Rube Goldberg ‘screwdriver’ design to confer autofocus via a coupling in the bayonet mount. Many late film era and better grade digital bodies from Nikon provide this capability. (The later AFD lens variants are optically identical but add a distance reporting CPU for better operation with selected Nikon flashguns).

No, there really is no excusing the sheer awfulness of the looks of the AF/AFD 50mm Nikkor. Just one look – better still a feel – of the metal era 50mm f/2 Nikon HC lens (HC means six elements, multicoated; the earlier single coated version was simply ‘H’) tells you how a lens should be made, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating. How do they compare optically?

Well, sad to relate the newer lens is optically worse in every regard at every aperture, center or corner. It shows high chromatic aberration fully open (color fringing) where the old lens shows none, it hotspots the center of the image below f/4 and the micro-contrast which the older lens delivers in abundance is simply missing in the AF lens.

But by all means buy the AF if AF is what you need. The very high standards of the metal era optic may not be equalled but we are talking state-of-the-art here, even by today’s standards. If the Leica Summicron is the reference for all 50mm lenses, then the 50mm f/2 Nikon HC more than gives it a run for the money. The AF/AFD will deliver decent results and at under $70 for a mint example is hardly a material economic drain. But, goodness, it feels awful to use. And using an ugly tool has never improved my images.


The 50’s era Summicron. Beauty and performance.

While there is nothing to choose between the optical performance of the 50mm Nikkor and Summicron of the era – though the Summicron will run you ten times as much as the Nikon on the used market – the Leitz lens comes with one nice plus. The finish is chrome plating and incredibly tough. I have never seen one worn through to the underlying brass. By contrast, the thin anodizing on the Nikon wears easily, leading to the ugly result shown above.

Kodak Ektar film

Film, Photographs

Just the ticket.

For an index of all my Film related articles, click here.

A friend had passed his last remaining roll of Kodak Ektar 100 to be for experimentation, and I am very pleased with the results.

This is a slow – 100 ASA – emulsion with a reputation for fine grain and punchy, contrasty colors, one it lived up to in spades.

This was also an opportunity to try another processing and scanning service after the disaster that was TheDarkroom.com which I concluded was an “offensively bad business”. I wasn’t about to give them another chance.

After some Googling I came up with a couple of services which offer high resolution scans along with online downloads of scanned images. Neither returns the original film unless you ask and that’s fine with me as I would only shred it. It’s extremely unlikely that high volume industrial grade scanners will be materially improved as the business opportunity is simply too small, so the state-of-the-art is either the Noritsu or the Fuji Frontier, both maxing out at around 4000 x 6000 pixels per scan. So retaining the original film strips, with all the attendant cataloging chores, in the hope of further scanning improvements down the road is a quixotic quest.

The first lab I tried is named Sharpprints and here’s the statement from their home page:


Click the image to go the the lab’s site.

Yes, their choice of camera, the Russkie POS Zenit, is execrable, as is the way the film is being held in that image with greasy, badly manicured fingers, but that’s really all the bad news there is. But rather than sit on my hands, I wrote them about that boo-boo:

I mailed my film roll of 36 exposures on a Monday morning using USPS ($3.50) and the scans were available for download the same Thursday at 2:17pm, accompanied by a terse email alerting me to the fact. This lab also uses Dropbox for online delivery but unlike TheDarkroom.com clearly knows what it is doing as the scans were immediately available and easily downloaded in a couple of minutes.

I found the results to be fine grained and much improved on Kodak Gold 200’s coarse and nasty grain. I’m thinking Gold 200 is just a poor quality product. Of the 36 scans one image had a fine piece of dirt on it – easily fixed in Photoshop – and all the others were fault free. The processing and scanning cost was just $14.

This roll of film gave me another chance to look at the abstraction of the varied architecture in downtown Phoenix and here is the ‘contact sheet’ from Lightroom after the cull:


34 keepers out of 36. All those years with film inculcated economy of effort.

The colors jump out at you and the film requires careful handling of highlights to avoid burn out. A little underexposure – say 1/2-1 stop – is a good idea in high contrast situations, what was called ‘exposing for the highlights’ in the previous century.


Noritsu scanner data.

Here are some favorites from this roll, all snapped on the Nikon FE and the experts assure us (who are these fools?) taken with the ‘worst zoom lens on the planet’, the excellent Nikon 43-86mm f/3.5 ‘walkabout wonder’:

It would be churlish to deny the influence of the great Keld Helmer-Petersen on my work, for he is one of the masters who taught me how to see all those decades ago in the era of film.

Sharpprints.com is located in Eau Claire, Wisoncsin and the results of their work testify to solid, midwestern American values. There’s no nonsense about creating an account so that they can inundate you with junk mail. Just mail in the film after printing, completing and including their online form and you are done. I recommend them.

Two twenties

Nikon lenses

Not much changes.

Long term readers may recall that I swapped my 20mm f/3.5 MF AiS Nikkor of 1982 vintage for the much earlier 1973 20mm f/3.5 UD non-Ai Nikkor which I both Ai’d and chipped.

The optical trade-offs were clear. The older lens is superior in the center down to f/8 while the AiS optic delivers better edges fully open and remains better at small apertures. This works for me as the ergonomics and sheer delight in the handling of the 20mm UD remain unparalleled. This is how lenses should be made. After 5 years with the UD Nikkor I am as happy as can be.


Nikon D3x, 20mm UD Nikkor, ISO200.

A much later 20mm f/2.8 AFD Nikkor recently joined my stable and a quick check of performance discloses that Nikon had made little progress in center definition by 1989 when this lens was made. Against the f/3.5 UD, the UD is sharper in the center down to f/8, after which the two are comparable. The AF optic is better at the edges through f/8 (though not as good as the Ai-S predecessor!) and remains slightly better through the smallest aperture. Be sure to keep your fingers away from the focus collar in AF mode as it spins around merrily in finding focus.


AFD lens on the left – competent but ugly.

I’m not publishing test snaps here as they would look much like the earlier ones comparing the UD with the AiS, the only difference being that in Scottsdale my backyard features a lovely desert garden rather than the ugly utility pole from the Bay Area.

The UD weighs in at a solid 14oz, courtesy of its all metal construction, with the plastic-fantastic AF/AFD at a mere 10oz, barely more than the AiS with AF thrown in. Impressive, if not beautiful.

AF is really not necessary in a lens this wide where depth of field covers for focusing errors, but at $230 delivered with Nikon filter, hood and caps, who is complaining?

If you want the last word in central definition and handling, go for the UD. If compactness and solid overall performance is your thing, the AiS is indicated. And for those wanting AF with little weight penalty, the AF/AFD is the right choice, if you can live with all that plastic. The early AF was improved with a revised CPU in 1994 which provides distance metering for Nikon flashes, being renamed ‘AFD’. If you want to save some cash and do not use flash, the AF predecessor has identical optics and mechanics. All of these in mint condition can be found for around $200 but UD variants are hard to find in pristine shape as the scalloped metal focus collar does not take well to hard use and looks ugly once the black anodizing starts coming off. The UD, the oldest optic here, is also the best at controlling flare spots. Not all change is progress ….

There’s also the 20mm f/2.8 AiS MF Nikkor, first sold in 1994 and still available new for almost $700 which I profiled here. For the money asked I really cannot recommend it new or used ($400-$500) as its corner performance is really not much to boast about.

All of these lenses are easily chipped – a simple glue-on operation. The f/3.5 AiS and f/2.8 AiS come Ai’d from the factory. Adding an Ai fork to the UD is not nuclear physics, and I illustrate that in the first link above.

All these 20mm Nikons exhibit the complex ‘mustache’ or wave distortion and for the UD, f/3.5 AiS and f/2.8 AiS you can download my lens correction profile here which fixes that and removes vignetting and most chromatic aberration. The profile for the AF/AFD comes bundled from Adobe with Lightroom and works well.