Tag: film photography

Nikon’s N70 Film Camera: Part 2

By Joe Berk

This is a follow up to the recent post on my recently reacquired Nikon N70 film camera.

In the prior blog, I mentioned the N70’s rear door gooification issue and that I had read on an Internet forum it was a common issue.  My camera’s rear door was like fly paper, with all kinds of debris stuck to it.  I used the approach the forum commenter mentioned:  A shop rag and alcohol, a little elbow grease, and the goo came off.  The plastic underneath has a nice glossy black finish that matches the camera’s other exterior surfaces.  It looks good.  Here’s a pair of before and after photos:

Good buddy Greg spotted me three rolls of ISO 400 35mm film.  He told me the film was 6 or 8 years old, but he thought it still might be good.  I loaded a roll in the N70.

I don’t like UV filters and that’s what the Tamron 28-105 lens had on it when I took it home from New Jersey.  I prefer a polarizer unless I’m shooting at night or using the flash.  At one point I probably had a 62mm polarizer, but I tossed a bunch of camera debris and detritus a few months ago and if I ever had a 62mm polarizer (which is what the Tamron takes), it went out with that batch.  No problem; I found a 62mm polarizer and a 62mm lens cap on Amazon.  I ordered both, along with three rolls of ISO 200 35mm film.  I figured if the film Greg gave didn’t work out, this film would because it was brand new.  Even if Greg’s film was good, I’d need more eventually.

You know, it’s not easy to find 35mm film in stores like it used to be.  Costco used to have a big area stocked with all kinds of 35mm from Fuji and Kodak, ranging from ISO 100 to ISO 1600 (with everything in between).  They also had a huge section for processing film and making enlargements.  The Costco film developing and printing services were inexpensive, they did a great job, and they turned it around in under an hour.  It’s all gone now.  Wiped clean from the face of the earth, as they say.  Sometimes I feel like turning around, walking out, and shouting at the clouds.  I’m an old man, so I can do it.  But I don’t.

Anyway, to get back to the Nikon story, I shot up that first roll of expired ISO 400 film.  Just silly stuff…pictures of the house (which immediately caused my neighbor to come over and ask if we were listing the house), my office area, and a couple of motorcycles.  The roll of film provided just 24 exposures and it went quickly.  When I shoot digital, I might take a hundred shots in a single stop.  Shooting film, though, is like shooting a single-shot  rifle.  You think more.  You have to make each shot count.

A quick Google search on film developers near me showed that there weren’t too many, but there was a guy across the street from Costco.  I had used him once before to get some older negatives scanned for a magazine article, so I knew he was good.  I rolled over there and to my surprise, I had to stand in line.  What do you know?  There are other people who still shoot film.  As I patiently waited my turn, I thought that this guy probably doesn’t mind Costco exiting the film business.

When I was my turn, David (the guy behind the counter) remembered me.  He asked if I wanted the negatives and the prints.  At first I said yes, but then I remembered I have gobs of old prints and negatives stuffed away all over the house.  So I said no, I just want the scanned images.  David’s shop scans in either of two resolutions (medium or high); he didn’t know what the DPI (dots per inch) for either.  My digital Nikon shoots at 300 DPI, but I have to knock the images down to 72 DPI in PhotoShop for the ExNotes blog (everything you’ve ever seen on the blog is 72 DPI).   David told me the digital images (scanned from my negatives) would be in my Dropbox account the next day (he actually delivered them that same night).  The medium resolution images were at 256 DPI.

When I opened the scanned images, at first I thought that the expired film may have, in fact, expired.  The images were faded, and because I was shooting ISO 400 film, they were also somewhat grainy. Okay, so the film guys were serious about that use by date.  I played with one, though, to see if I could bring it to life.  Here’s what it looked like initially:

Here’s what it looked like after I worked on it a bit in PhotoShop:

The next step was to try the new ISO 200 film.  Sue and I spent a couple of days in Death Valley, and I tossed the N70 into my overnight bag for that trip.

I don’t think it’s possible to have a bad stay in Death Valley, although I understand that the folks who named the place might have thought otherwise.  I love it there.  This time, we explored the surrounding areas, including Tecopa Springs a few miles away.  Tecopa Springs sounds a lot more exotic than it really is.  There’s a bar and pizza place so I ordered one of their craft beers and a pizza.   I took a photo of it before we dug in and when I received the scan after I returned home, it was depressingly bland.  Here’s what it looked like:

The scan with this roll of new 35mm ISO 200 Fuji film, as delivered, looked about the same as the stuff I had shot with the expired film.  Maybe the developer didn’t automatically tweak it to highlight the colors.   I opened the scan in PhotoShop, cropped it, adjusted the levels and curves, cranked in a little vibrance, deleted the distractions in the upper left corner, and hit it with the shadows feature to brighten the image’s upper half.  That brought it to life a little better.

Here’s another set of before and after images in Death Valley’s Artist’s Palette area.  This is the photo on the road heading there before any PhotoShop trickery:

Here’s that image with its levels and curves adjusted:

In the photo above, the mountains and the road look exactly as I remember them.  The sky is a bit too vibrant, but that’s the polarizer earning its keep.

This is another pair of images at Artist’s Palette.  The first is the scan as I received it from the developer:

This is the image above with its curves and levels adjusted:

Again, the sky is too deep, but the rest of the image is true to how I remember it.    The guy in the image is using his iPhone, which probably returned the bright colors you see in the PhotoShop-tweaked photos without him doing anything.  That’s because the iPhone does all the mods automatically.

So what’s the bottom line?  Digital, my brothers.  Film photography is fun, but for me it’s a huge step back.  I’ll take my Nikon D3300 or D810 over film any time I’m out.  The N70 is interesting, but it’s digital all the way for me.  With two or three exceptions, and those are the other film cameras I brought back from New Jersey, including a very nice Honeywell Pentax ES (if I can find the right size battery for it).  Stay tuned.

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Nikon’s N70 35mm Film Camera

By Joe Berk

I visited with my sister a couple of weeks ago and she gave me four 35mm film cameras.  You know, the ones we used to use before everything went digital.  One was a point and shoot Minolta, another was a Chinese copy of a Minolta single lens reflex non-autofocus camera, another was my Dad’s old Honeywell Pentax ES (with four Takumar lenses that were known as some of the best glass available back in the 1960s and 1970s), and a fourth was my old Nikon N70, complete with a Tamron 28-105mm zoom lens.  I had given the N70 to my sister when I bought a Nikon F5, which was a huge top-of-the-line film camera when film ruled the roost.   The N70 made the full circle, coming back to me again after being gone for more than 20 years.  The N70 is the focus (pardon the pun) of this blog.

The N70 and it’s Tamron 28-105 zoom lens. I can use some of my other Nikon digital camera lenses on the N70, too.

The N70 was the second camera I ever purchased.  The first was a 35mm Minolta X700 that I bought a week before my first daughter was born because my wife told me I needed a camera to record the occasion.  I bought the Minolta because it was what the store (a large Fedco, which is no more) sold and everything was automatic (except for focusing, which no one offered at the time).  And, it was what my brother-in-law shot (he was a photography enthusiast, so I figured it had to be good).  The Minolta was a far better camera than I was a photographer, but I really wasn’t getting the eye-popping photos I saw in the photography magazines (and I did a lot of my learning through magazines; there was no internet in those days).

The N70 had what Nikon called a command dial. It wasn’t well received in the market back then. I’ll have to relearn how to use it. It was one of the first film cameras to have an LCD screen interface, a common feature on today’s digital cameras.

Nope, in those days, my Minolta was a manual focus camera, and I figured what I really needed was autofocus.  The ticket in for me was the Nikon N70 (the very one you see here) sold to me by a very competent young salesman at our local Ritz camera store.  It used to be that every major shopping mall had a Ritz camera store; with the advent of the internet, they’ve all disappeared, too.

I didn’t know very much about photography back then, but autofocus really made things better.  My pictures (all print, of course) were turning out great.  I liked the reaction my little 4×6 prints were getting at family dinners, and I started reading more and more about the art of photography.  You know, all the stuff the camera did automatically.  Apertures.  Shutter speeds.  Different ISOs.  How to use the flash, even in daylight.  And then I learned more.  Composition.  The rule of thirds.  Lighting.  The more I learned, the more I shot, and the more I shot, the better my photos became.  Then a funny thing happened. I went back to my old Minolta (without autofocus) and my photos with it were way better, too.  Who would have thought?

The world continued to change.  Ebay became a thing, and so did digital photography.  I resisted digital photography, partly because I am a cheap SOB and partly because I thought I was a purist.  Until I tried digital.  The difference was incredible.  I sold all of my film cameras and the lenses that went with them.

With my sister’s generosity and my newly-rehomed collection of four film cameras, though, I am regressing and I hope to soon be rediscovering the wonders of film photography.  Or going back to my roots.  Or becoming more traditional.  You can choose the words you like.

Nikon didn’t do an adequate job selecting the rear camera door rubberized covering. As it aged, it turned to a sticky, gooey mess.
Where the film goes. The N70 didn’t require threading the film in. Simply plop the film in the camera with about three inches pulled out of the canister, close the camera back, press the shutter button, and the film feeds in automatically. It advances automatically after each shot (a cool feature 30+ years ago).

Anyway, the topic du jour is my N70.  I just ordered a few rolls of Fuji ISO 200 film for it from Amazon, and I’ll put the old Nikon through its paces when the film gets here.  When I picked up the N70 from my sister, I thought she had spilled something gooey on the back cover because it was all sticky.  But it wasn’t her doing.  I did a Google search and it was a common complaint.  Apparently Nikon had applied a rubber-like material on the cover, which degraded over time.  I had that happen on a Bell motorcycle helmet one time (a shame, really; I loved the artwork on that helmet).  One of the guys who wrote about the Nikon N70’s gooification issue said that the rubber goo came off with alcohol, so I’ll try that on mine.

The Nikon feels good in my hands (the gooey cover notwithstanding).  I packed it on a lot of motorcycle rides, including the Three Flags Classic nearly 20 years ago.  Handling it is like coming home to an old friend. Watch for my photos with the N70; I’ll post them in a future blog (if I can find a place that still develops 35mm film).

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Phavorite Photos: Odonata Porn

By Joe Berk

You might be wondering if we are switching to an x-rated site.  We are not. I just happened to be out and about with my camera when the above photo op emerged and I grabbed it.  I think it is probably one of the best nature shots I ever grabbed, although I have similar one with a couple of raccoons but that’s a photo for another Phavorite Photos blog.

We were out servicing a water treatment site in California’s Yucca Valley.  In those days I was lugging around a real tank of a camera:  The Nikon F5.  It was Nikon’s top of the line film camera when film still ruled.  The camera was huge and it weighed a ton, and I compounded the felony by mounting a 180mm Sigma macro lens on it.  I had ridden my Suzuki TL 1000S there (I could fit the camera and it’s lens into my tail bag).  The best thing about that job was that I could combine a lot of extra-curricular into my work, like motorcycle rides and photography.

Back to the Odanata story.  Odonata is the entomological classification for three groups of insects.  One of those groups includes dragonflies, and the dragonflies were out in force that fine California day.  And I was lucky to have brought that 180mm Sigma macro lens with me.  It was perfect for the photo ops that presented themselves that day.  I tried pictures in flight, but I had no luck.  When the painted ladies stopped on a twig or a weed or a branch, though, I was in Fat City.   I dropped the film off at our local Costco (they still sold and processed film in those days), I did a little shopping (I love Costco), and an hour later, they were ready.  The photo guy told me it was very unusual to see photos this “perfect.”  I took the compliment.   The pictures looked good on the 4×6 prints; they looked even better on my computer.

Both the F5 and the 180mm Sigma lens have gone down the road.  Digital took over from film, I went full bore into the digital world, and I found the 180mm Sigma macro lens wasn’t good for much else besides fornicating dragonflies.   Today I use a Sigma 50mm macro for all my closeup work (it’s about as perfect a lens as I’ve ever used for macrophotography), and my cameras are either Nikon’s D810, the D3300, or my cell phone.

Earlier Phavorite Photos?  You bet!  Click on each to get their story.

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