Brief Encounter

I - Moderato

You know the phrase "better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all"? Oh how true it is. As I write this I have only my faithful Nikon F3 as a photographic tool. Considering not so very long ago I wrote an article proclaiming the virtues of such cameras I feel decidedly unenthusiastic about it. Moreover, at the beginning of March I succumbed to temptation and bought my dream camera: a Nikon D70. I loved how easily the controls came to hand, conveying a sense of thorough testing. The balance, the weight, the size: all perfect. Not only was it lovely as an object, it also reignited my creative spark. It made me feel adventurous and experimental again. It made me feel alive.

In little over three weeks the frame counter topped the four thousand mark. Four thousand! My other digital camera, a Canon S50, only reached that many in six months! The dSLR gave my photography a new lease of life, harking back to the halcyon days of college and my little Fuji 4800z. Almost daily I was producing images that not only passed muster but that I was proud of. Proud enough to spend nearly £50 getting three of them printed 15×10 and framed. In the year and a half I had my S50 I produced maybe ten images I really liked. Even by my standards that's pretty poor.

In terms of usability the D70 is the antithesis of the S50. To begin with the little Canon and I got along great, with me excited and enthusiastic about my new toy. Before long though a strange impression came bubbling up from my subconscious: the S50 was really quite a chore to use, a perpetual struggle to make it do what I wanted. I began to enter that place all artists dread: the creative doldrums. Now, I can't lay the blame entirely on the S50 as that would be unfair - life at the time was hardly fanning the flames of my creative fire. Even so, the fact remains that the Canon brick built a wall around my imagination.

The D70 on the other hand was like a gale of fresh air that blew down the wall. I felt almost immediately at home with the camera. Everything I disliked about the S50 was quick and efficient on the D70. The Canon was so slow, but not in the same way as a manual SLR, whereas everything about the Nikon seemed to happen instantly. Whereas the compact incessantly drew attention to itself, in use the SLR was much more an extension of creative instinct. Don't think, just do. The Nikon D70 essentially opened the floodgates and let the creativity flow free, and I absolutely loved every minute of it.

II - Adagio Sostenuto

You're perhaps wondering why I describe my fling with the D70 in the past tense. Thus we come at length to the inevitable tragic event. My D70 is broken. One minute I'm happily snapping away, the next the top LCD declares "FEE" and my new best friend goes dark and silent. I think, "oh", trying to suppress a rising panic. Take the battery out, see if that helps. Nope. Take out out for thirty seconds. Nope. Toggle power switch repeatedly. Nope. Cross fingers and try again. Nope. Relax. Breathe. This £800 camera is still under warranty, no big deal. But for now it's a big black £800 paperweight. I can't even gaze into its eyepiece and pretend to take pictures because with no power it goes dark, blurry and lifeless.

The next day I book the comatose camera in for repair. Working in a camera shop I can track its progress daily. This is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand I know pretty well what's going on with my camera. On the other, I know pretty well that this is currently nothing. The computer, being the verbose and communicative machine it is, declares that my camera is "awaiting estimate". Quite apart from the fact that it's been "awaiting estimate" for three weeks now, this concerns me further because I have estimated the cost of repair, to me at least, to be zero. I don't particularly care how much the engineer has to be paid to heal my camera, so long as it happens soon. Aha, but that would be asking too much it appears. Just to rub a tablespoon of salt in the wound, we (in the shop) get a Nikon D100 back from repair. Upon collection the customer kindly informed us he'd been waiting three months to get his camera back. "Marvellous," I think. I shall be bereft of camera for three sodding months. Life is harsh.

III - Allegro Scherzando

So now I'm left with two cameras, neither of them digital (I finally sold the S50 yesterday, at a loss of £350. Such is digital life). There's an almost fully-intact Nikon F90x Pro, missing only the little lens mount pin that locks the lens in place. It's big, with the MB-10 unable to be removed due to a missing battery cover. It eats film like peanuts. On the plus side it focusses fast, and the viewfinder is gloriously huge, but it just doesn't have that mysterious "X-factor" that still attracts me to my second remaining camera, the old faithful F3. The manual SLR is a small, basic no-frills photographic tool that just feels right. It's predictable and with a bit of practice, fast. On a recent trip down to Brighton it proved its worth, allowing me to capture quite a few keepers.

I freely admit I've been well and truly spoiled by the near-instant gratification of a digital SLR. However, while it will certainly be sorely missed I'm determined not to let the relative inconvenience of using film douse the flames. To some extent I've tasted too much of the forbidden fruit: I've switched from my cherished Tri-X to XP2 Super, simply because I have neither the time nor the inclination to develop my own film now. More for me the plug-and-play approach of C-41–based processing.

They say every cloud has a silver lining and in my case the argent is the new avenues of exploration afforded by film: cross-processing chrome (for that authentic 50s feel), infra-red (plus filters, minus money), super-grainy Delta 3200 (or Tri-X pushed as far) and numerous others, as yet undiscovered. Who knows, perhaps when I do eventually get my D70 back my F3 might not end up on eBay after all.

2005_04_15