A few more minutes with a Nikon 35Ti

I had this brilliant idea a couple weeks back to take my Nikon 35Ti to a wedding with a couple rolls of film to accompany its spiritual sucessor, the Nikon Coolpix A.  Except it didn't work out very well.   

The ceremony was to be out doors, followed by a reception inside.  So I put in a 36 shot Fuji B&W 100 ISO film, with the idea to change to a 400 ISO film that I was going to push to 1600 for indoors.  Before the ceremony started, I blew off 10 shots or so, but due to high winds, the ceremony was pulled inside.  Which meant I had 25 shots of film I now couldn't use, so I stuck it in my pocket.

About an hour later, I went to pull out the camera from my pocket and promptly dropped it, and the film door sprung open.  Fortunately it was quite dark, but still several shots would have been destroyed.

When I got home I used the rest of the film up shooting the kids, so there should be some photos in all of that.

Nikon Coolpix A, Queen and Ossington, TO

Nikon 35Ti Results

Recently I go the film back that I had been waiting to have processed that I shot with my Nikon 35Ti, and I was very pleased with the results. You can read my initial impressions here. I shot Kodak E100VS E6 slide film, and after reading some user reviews on the web, I set the exposure compensation for +2/3 of a stop.  This was a wise and fortuitous move, as all the exposures were close to spot on.

The other thing that impressed me was sharpness.  The lens in this camera is excellent, with tons of detail resolved on the film.  A 35mm f2.8 lens is enough to isolate objects and throw the background out of focus, as well as keeping the lens small.

There are two things that annoy me even more about the camera from when I used it..  The first is that the panoramic switch is easily and unknowingly moved, so a lot of my shots were (sadly) cropped.  The second is you can't tell if critical focus has been acheived.  Some of my shots, especially those close to the subject when wide open, were out of focus.  Not much you can do about this though.

Lastly, the flash works fine, but it sure doesn't have the finesse of my Fuji X100 for fill in.

Otherwise, I was really very pleased with the quality of the photos, and I think I'll hang on to this camera for a while.

The wonderful and very weird Nikon 35Ti

Recently I purchased a Nikon 35Ti compact film camera.  Its Nikon's high end pocket camera from the early 1990's and features an ultra sharp retractable 35mm f2.8 lens, titanium construction and the world's most awesome analogue camera display.  Just the display alone makes it look expensive, and when it was released almost 20 years ago, it was indeed expensive at $1000+ MSRP.

It's a very weird and quirky camera with an automatic flash that you can't turn off automatic mode, though it has two override buttons, one to switch the flash on or switch it off, if it decides to come on.......or not come on. Follow me?  These buttons, located on the front of the camera are so small and inset, that the tiniest fingers will have difficulty selecting them.

You also manually have to select red-eye flash mode via a button on the side of the camera, and the panoramic mode is very easy to accidentally select.  Fortunately there is an icon in the finder to warn you of this.

If you like vintage analogue watches, the dials are a whole lotta awesome.  There is a dial for aperture, focus distance, a counter and for exposure compensation.  For some weird reason, the one I bought is out by one stop when showing the aperture.

The viewfinder display is actually quite good, being bright and displaying tons of information.  It also has a frameline that corrects for parallex for close up photos, similar to the Fuji GA645i I also have.

The film I have shot though it is still being develped, but I am expecting the results to be good.  I shot E6, so I am hoping that the meter is accurate enough to not ruin the shots.

Overall - this camera is an interesting study in weirdness, especially in operation.  If I didn't know I was shooting Nikon, I would have thought it a Fuji, as the X-100 is also a bit like this.  The test will remain when I get the film back to see just how good the shots are.