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| St John island in Sepia. Nikon FA, Tamron 28mm 2.5 Adaptall. LR'ed. |
Its quite a vicious cycle, if you were to ask me. To learn, just by reading and observing is not as effective as compared to learning by doing. But to learn by doing, mistakes need to be made before one can learns. The old adage, learn from your mistakes hold true here. Films are costly. And time is also costly. Thus making mistakes, learning from those mistakes and continually learning and improving from those mistakes can be an expensive affair. The process of learning is a never ending cycle of reading, observing, making deductions and trying them out. Although, in my opinion, learning can be achieved through some of these processes, effective applications and further enhancement of learning is only achieved when learning encompasses all the of the various processes.
In my previous post, I stressed on the importance of learning about the camera. In this post, with the camera, one needs to learn what is the camera trying to tell you, the photographer. And in this aspect, one need to understand the language of light metering.
I found about this "miscommunication" the hard, painful way. The betrayal comes when you received your prints, your scans or your whatever, and they are dark. Very dark. So basically, the camera was telling me, that from its algorithm, the scene in which I am pointing at, is too dark for the aperture and shutter speed settings that I have set. Being excited at a family dinner, I was too engrossed in composig scenes after scenes, that I totally ignored the blinking lights that the camera is showing me through its viewfinder. As such, apart from the money that went down the drain, about $40 of it, I cannot get back the moments that had passed.
Learning from the incident, I decided to bring my Nikon FA to another family event. This time, to celebrate my birthday. This was at St John island. I did also bring my Fuji XT2 just in case I wanted to go trigger happy. I did finished a roll, a Chinese ISO 400 colour film using the Tamron 28mm 2.5 which I got off Ebay.
The Nikon FA was back from being serviced and I wanted to run a roll through it. I also wanted to see how good the Matrix metering was so, I basically shot all on Aperture Priority.
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| With the Singapore skyline in the background. Nikon FA, Tamron 28mm 2.5 Adaptall. LR'ed. |
Reading and watching many, many videos on film cameras, I know the immense brightness of the sky will overpower the scene. If I were to rely solely on the camera metering system, I am sure, my family would be in silhouette. I then used the exposure compensation dial to expose the scene to add 2 more stops of light. And I am so happy, the faces of my family were not in total shadow, and also the sky was not totally burnt out. Lesson learnt and applied.
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| Crossing the causeway between Lazarus and St John islands. Nikon FA, Tamron 28mm 2.5 Adaptall. LR'ed. |
The above picture showed the light from the sky is almost similar to the light on my family members' faces. In this scene, I relied totally on the Nikon FA metering in deciding which combination of shutter speed it should fire at, at the aperture setting I set.
The Nikon FA
I like the Nikon FA. It's ergonomics set up is quite welcome in my hands. I can grip the camera quite confidently. The dials and buttons and what nots is easily reached and come to me quite naturally. Love the auditory feedback when the shutter is pressed and when the film is wind and rewind. Love the viewfinder too.
What I do not like is the location of the button to adjust the exposure compensation button. Its quite awkward to access is, press it and turn the exposure compensation dial. As compared to the Fuji XT2, its a very big negative. It might prevent other people from using it, especially beginners in understanding the camera.
I leave a link to a short video of the Nikon FA.
Till my next post.
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