35mm Street Brotography

I was at the Palo Alto Highschool Parking-Lot Fleamarket this Sunday and picked up a Nikon FG (35mm. SLR) and an excellent lens for it (50mm. f/1.8 Nikon System E) for $25 in total. I drive a damn hard bargain; I got the camera and the lens together for less than the seller first told me he would take for the lens alone. The lens and camera ran around $1K each when they came out. The camera appeared to be in beautiful condition. The lens was clean and the focus and aperture smooth.

This camera and lens are 30 years old, but completely compatible with my Nikon DSLR: I can mount a 30-year-old film lens on my digital camera, and this film camera can use my digital lenses, even though it was produced two decades before digital photography even existed. Everything works flawlessly with everything else. The batteries on the FG were dead, but I was still able to test the shutter, aperture, etc. because Nikon makes film cameras that can be used even with complete power failure. Three decades of forward compatibility, three decades of backward compatibility, and an electric camera that still works when its batteries are dead? Now that’s what I call engineering.

I bought batteries and some film at Wallgreen’s. The light meter powered up just fine (this is one of the first cameras to be made with a built-in light meter). You set the focus, aperture, film speed, and exposure by hand, but the light meter is helping you along all the way. The camera has to be wound and manually focused for each shot.

I ran a few rolls of ISO=200 color Kodachrome (negative) film through it and had it processed at Keeble & Shuchat. I paid $5 for the processing (they did an excellent job) and $20 to have the negatives scanned at 3000 X 2000 and inverted (they did an awful job). I strongly recommend against having K&S scan your film. I could do better with a $100 film scanner, and intend to scan negatives myself at Stanford, if I can find a film scanner anywhere, which I think I will. The scans that K&S gave me were full of JPEG artifacts and the fine details were lost in the grain / noise. This means that the limiting factor in the spatial resolution was either the film’s grain or K&S’s scanning. I very much doubt that the grain of ISO=200 film is bad enough that it would limit resolution: improper focusing on my behalf is the most likely candidate, followed by camera shake on my behalf, followed by limitations of the lens. Therefore the bottleneck is most likely scanning-related; I’ll see if I can do better.

In the meantime, here are some terrible scans of photographs I shot over the last few days. The negatives hopefully aren’t this terrible.

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“Two Men And Two Empty Glasses”

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“Woman Looking At Street Sign (No Shame Darlin’, I Been There)”

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“Man With Yellow Highlights”

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“Methadone Head”

Photographer’s Note: I noticed this man at the Palo Alto CalTRAIN station, nodding off. I was able to focus on him from about a meter away (it takes 10 seconds or so for me to focus the camera and 2-15 seconds to adjust the aperture, depending on the light) and then I made clicking noises until he raised his head, which he did very slowly. He was myopic and had that dull, noddy methadone look. I hit the shutter and walked away. After a while he came hobbling after me, moving very slowly. I walked towards him. He explained in a trembling voice that “this is my first day off probation” and asked me to delete the image. I explained that this was a film camera and that I couldn’t erase just one frame, under the assumption that he was ignorant and would believe me. He did. I walked away and he stood about looking confused. Of course, with Nikon SLRs, it’s completely possible to “erase” just one frame, although one doesn’t get the “memory” back. I hadn’t advanced the film, so the frame with his image was still behind the shutter. I could have easily cranked down the F-stop and opened the shutter for a second or so, flooding the frame with millions of times more light than would give correct exposure and burning the frame to pure white. The camera has a mechanism to prevent one from accidentally opening the shutter more than once without advancing the film, but it can be overridden; I assume the main purpose is to allow multiple-exposure photography, not to destroy images of the filmshy. Even if I had advanced the film, I could have “rewound” to the previous frame by simply pressing down the takeup reel release (normally used when rewinding film back into a canister prior to processing) and then cranking the film backwards with the rewind lever.

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“Dog Before Memorial Church”

Photographer’s Note: I shot this frame on Stanford’s campus. Since Stanford is private property, I didn’t have the nearly-unlimited right to photograph anyone and anything that I do in public places. Therefore, I followed the dog’s leash and asked the woman attached to the other end for permission to take a photograph, which she granted. There’s some irony in that I asked for permission to photograph this dog but not to photograph any of these people.

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The Nikon FG seems like it will be a good “carrying” camera for me, and I have gotten in the habit of carrying it about with me everywhere. It’s durable, cheap, and relatively small. I’ll see what kind of spatial resolution I can drag out of it, but I suspect it will be better than my DSLR.

It’s not a production camera; it’s not for high-volume shooting: film and processing are too expensive. Nor is it for shooting at night with flash, nor for shooting distant subjects, nor for shooting rapidly-moving subjects. I wouldn’t carry it under a circumstance where photography was the main activity at hand, but I will carry it while going about my day-to-day activities. It’s for photographing subjects-of-opportunity, not for premeditated acts of brotography. I’ve certainly had quite a few “damn, I wish I had a camera” moments, and I want to carry it for those.

On an unrelated note, I went rafting recently (Jack London Square, Oakland) and suspect that more aquatic activities are in my future, so it will be a good camera to bring along then. 50mm. isn’t exactly my preferred focal length since I generally photograph people and rarely landscapes, and I would prefer 135mm. or so, but the 50mm. is quite portable and I don’t intend to spend any money on 30-year-old lenses.

All I need now is some small carrying case that will hold it and an extra roll of 35mm. Basically, my options are a fannypack or a purse, and of course I’ll take the purse. I’d rather risk being called a fag or being on the receiving end of h8 crimes than being seen as “the kind of straight twenty-something male who wears a fannypack.” No one commits h8 crimes against str8 men who wear fannypacks, because that would be pointless: the damage is already done, you can’t make it worse by dragging “someone like that” behind a pickup truck.

Peas out.