New Toys: Nikon FE

After dealing with what I thought was something broken in the FG for two months, and after finally paying off some debts that had been hovering over us for awhile, and after doing a bunch of research, I bit the bullet and picked up another film SLR.

Initially, I wanted to get a Nikon FM3a, perhaps the best small SLR Nikon ever made. Used, they run between $600 and $700, and so I really thought long and hard about it, and after reading multiple reviews, decided on an $80 FE instead. Continue reading “New Toys: Nikon FE”

New Toys: Micro Nikkor 55mm f/2.8 and PK-13

After many years of hacking together macro things, reversing lenses, stacking lenses together, stacking reversed lenses on extension tubes, picking up old lenses with macro modes, etc., and after liking the results I got with them sometimes, I finally decided to pick up a proper macro lens, mostly to be the major part in a new Scan-O-Matic. I came up with the following criteria:

  • a filter ring that doesn’t rotate with focusing
  • corner-to-corner sharpness at f/5.6 or better
  • no light falloff at f/5.6 or better
  • 1:2 ratio (half life size), at least
  • a relatively short minimum focus distance

After weeks of research and hemming and hawing, while shopping for a new film camera, I did a quick search for the Micro Nikkor 55mm AI-s and spotted this one for a good price, with the PK-13 extension ring that will get it to 1:1. Continue reading “New Toys: Micro Nikkor 55mm f/2.8 and PK-13”

New Toys!

Back during the trip to Chicago (I think) I started having a problem with the meter on the FG: it would stop working at random points, and the M90 leds would start flashing (the 1/60th and 1/125th lights in the finder that flash when you first load a new roll of film, but before the camera decides you’ve wound on a couple of frames). It was all very random, sometimes it would be right at the beginning of a roll; other times it would happen in the middle.

I commented on this a couple of weeks ago, and did end up trying my hand at some diy camera repair (more on that later), but as a fallback option, decided to find another old, inexpensive film camera in case I couldn’t fix the FG. After several days of research, I decided on the slightly older, slightly more feature-rich Nikon FE. Continue reading “New Toys!”