Nikon’s
F3, like the original F, remained in production for many years and was still available new in stock after later Fs were on
the market. There are new ones on dealer shelves even today. It--again like the F--has become something of a cult item and a camera admired for beauty of design.
I bought
a used F3 a few months ago, and I can see why it inspires a following. It was
Nikon’s first true AE machine and the first to have an electronic shutter. These
features, you might recall, were initially unpopular amongst experienced photographers.
The thinking went this way: A camera is a machine like a Rolex watch,
not an electronic device like a quartz Timex. To overcome this prejudice, Nikon
gave the F3 a smoothness and heft equal to mechanical cameras. Handling an F3
was so much like handling the F or F2 that photographers could forget about the printed circuits lurking under their fingers. The key to this misdirection was the F3’s film advance. Nikon knew that photographers get their clearest sense of a camera’s quality from pushing the advance
ratchet; so that mechanism on the F3 was created with care and extra parts to be silky.
Every time you advance film, you are assured of the camera’s superb machining.
To keep this impression consistent, Nikon made the motorized advance—the motor drive—to unusually high
standards also.
As a sop
to those who worry about battery failure, the F3 offers a mechanical shutter speed:
1/80 second. It must’ve been costly to manufacture this backup;
and that expenditure may have gobbled up the budget for shutter-priority operation.
Yes, Nikon could have included mechanical backup and aperture-priority and shutter-priority—but that might have
pushed the F3 past a reasonable price point.
Metering
The best
way to avoid using mechanical backup is, of course, to avoid running down your batteries.
To extend battery life, Nikon used LCDs in the viewfinder instead of power-hungrier diodes. The LCDs are annoyingly small and dim and they can run down and die; but yes indeed, they barely sip electricity.
Dim display
notwithstanding, metering is where this camera capitalizes on electronics. The
meter is center-weighted 80/20 (!), and measures light even when the shutter is open.
So if a cloud moves in just as you push the shutter, it will not cause you to underexpose. I can’t say this feature rings my bell. Such an abrupt
change in light is rare—unless you are tracking racehorses through light and shadow--but I am looking at all this from
a 21st Century perspective. Twenty years ago, such metering was a
new capacity in cameras and could have been just the feature that sold me on the F3.
Another
useful feature is exposure lock. You aim at a given part of a scene, push a button,
and the F3 holds the exposure for you as you reframe. The button should be convenient
to your left hand because your right hand is tied up with releasing the shutter. But
that's not the way things are. The exposure lock is on the same side of the camera
as the shutter release, so your right hand has to hold in the magic button while also managing the release. I’ve
not found a hand distortion that makes this easy. It would only be easy if I
had very large hands, and I don’t.
I should
also admit that I’ve had difficulty working with the metering. I’m
not good at setting apertures in strong sunlight, and the F3 will cheerfully let me overexpose. It doesn’t warn me in any way, and there is no provision to cheat the shutter speed up to prevent
this. This is no problem if I’m shooting slowly with predictable subjects,
but with rapid street shooting I get too many toasted negatives.
Flash
The Olympus
OM2 dazzled the industry in the late seventies with its off-the-film metering of flash.
The very idea was startling, much less the actuality-- and this feature was on a consumer-level machine. Nikon caught up with the OM2 with its F3, which similar flash metering.
Nikon achieved this with dedicated flash guns that integrated with the circuitry of the F3 body. I don’t think this capacity would have been attractive to professional studio photographers or even
photojournalists; but Nikon must have felt that sales to serious amateurs would be damaged if they didn’t keep up with
Olympus.
I have tried
only one of the F3’s dedicated flashguns, but it works as advertised. In
a variety of conditions, the F3/dedicated flashgun combination has given me dead-on exposures—as accurate as any I’ve
achieved with a flash meter.
