The Good and the Bad

I ran a roll of film though the Nikon FM10 I picked up on eBay for Donna. The camera was a bargain — body and a Nikkor 35-70mm zoom for $49.99 plus shipping. For the purposes of the test, I used only the 35-70 that came with the camera. Anyway, I ran an old roll of Kodak Gold 200 print film through the thing, and had it quicky-processed at the expensive-chain-camera-store-in-the-mall. They came out very nicely, although maybe a half-stop over exposed.

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This is the 4th image off the camera, and this scan is from the 4×6 print, so, it’s not ideal. Expensive-chain-camera-store-in-the-mall is using a digital printing system, and being as the image was scanned from said digital print, and it was squashed down in the JPEG compression, it’s not as crisp as the negative is. But, it’s not too hateful.

The camera itself was really pretty nice to use. This particular one has a couple of little quirks, being as it’s used and cheap. There’s a minor issue with the film advance lever, in that, once you’ve wound a frame and cocked the shutter, it is still possible to continue to advance the film — like someone forced the wind lever once, and broke off the little internal pin. Not a huge deal, as long as you’re careful and remember. It also seems to over-expose by maybe 1/2 stop. That could be as simple as a weak battery. My only other gripe is the same problem I have with nearly every other camera on the shelf — eye relief. In fact, I’m not sure of any camera that would allow me to see 100% of the viewfinder.

So, that was the good.

Now, the bad….

I wanted to get the slides from the Tim Edberg seminar back ASAP, and I didn’t want to take a chance on not getting them back in time by getting them sent out by the expensive-chain-camera-store-in-the-mall. So, I took a risk and took them to TechLab. Some of you may remember my not-so-enthusiastic comments about the last time I went there.

Once again, the stuff came back f—ed up. This time, there’s no color, except for green. Yes, it’s possible that the film was bad. Or, it’s more likely that they did something wrong. This was a simple job, though — one roll of Fuji Velvia shot at rated speed. It should not have been rocket science to make pretty pictures from it.

BTW, I can tell that this is not something that I boogered up. I only shot a part of the roll, so the bits that I didn’t shoot should have been pretty much solid black. Instead, they’re a kinda non-descript milky green color. Yuck.

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This image is right off the scanner, and is pretty much exactly what the transparencies look like. Fortunately, I was shooting with the digital camera as well, so I got some stuff that was usable for the seminar critique session on the 11th. But, there was more involved with this roll of film, as you know. This was the test to see how using the N8008 in manual mode was going to work.

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So, this is what a little playing did. I might at least be able to get some funky black & whites out of the deal. But, I’m massively disappointed.

I’m guessing I ought to grab a roll of color print and run it through the camera over the next couple of days, and see what that yields. Maybe I’ll just buy another FM10.

[UPDATE - I've louped a few of the slides now, and my focus is pretty darned good. Not perfect, mind you, but overall, I think I can handle manually focusing. And, from the evidence presented in the FM10 experiment, I can still manually expose an image. These are both "good things." And, I still want to do as much as possible to get back to the basics.]