Nikon FM3a

Today's episode is sponsored by Squarespace. When you picture the perfect camera, it's always the Holga, right? Well, sit down for a second because I'm about to blow the ham off your butt cheeks. It isn't the Holga. In fact, there is no such thing as the perfect camera except the Nikon FM3A. Here's what happened. A few months ago, I was confronted with a profound question. What if buying another film camera finally fixes me? And yes, it was me that confronted me with that question. So I began to peruse eBay and the faint echoes of Trev Lee. Hereby forth known as Trevor Lee. Began to rattle in my brain. All my life, literally since I was a baby, Trev has been championing the Nikon FM3A. But a lot of people champion a lot of stuff. So how do you really know if it's quality or not? I guess I could have just borrowed the camera from him. Whatever. I gave eBay a good old sneaky peekaroo like I used to do in my late night trench coat days. And I nearly spat out my hot dog water. What the hell? This camera's $800? Better wash my car for that price. You know, once it's back from impound. So call me evil Bob Barker because that price can't be right. There's half a billion Nikons from the same era on eBay for far less money. So what is it exactly that makes the Nikon FM3A so special? That's a good question. Because in terms of looks, the Nikon FM3A... Well, let's just say it's not gonna attract a mate. You know what I mean? Whatever. Obviously, I ordered the camera as part of this ongoing investigation into potential fraud. But we'll find out soon. It finally showed up in the mail and I was kind of taken aback. It's not very big and not very heavy at all, despite being made from, I guess, brass and other exotic aggregates. Comparatively, the body itself is actually quite similar in size to my Leica M6, which is famously regarded and often purchased for its compact size. All the Leica people just left this video. Anyway, I put several rolls through the thing. And okay, yeah, obviously it takes pictures. But does it take better pictures than other cameras? That's like asking if you got drunker better than someone at the party last night. And of course, the answer is always, yeah, duh. Truthfully, I think what makes the Nikon FM3A a standout performer is actually what lies under the hood. So let's hit the back roads of Texas while a guy, obviously on the verge of a breakdown, breaks it down. Do you think people come to Dallas for a vacation? People are like, should we go to France this year? Spain? F*** it. Let's go to Dallas. Oh, yeah, but wait. First, we got to hit barbecue so that we randomly, you know, get tired and fall asleep for two hours later on in the day. And yeah, it was surprisingly good, despite looking like a tray of rations you'd get in prison. Anyway, we found our first location. I can't miss attraction in the area. You want to go to Nile Lake? I pulled out the Nikon FM3A in full cowboy drip and loaded some Ektachrome because that's about all I shoot for color these days. Ektachrome E100 at this old house. I don't think I'm going to shoot it on color. Anyway, I did shoot it on color and it sucked. But not because of the camera. It was a big ass vulture that flew out of one of these buildings. So hazards of the job, I suppose. These photos look a lot better. Sure, yeah, there isn't a lot of color in them to, I guess, justify using expensive film stock that specifically emphasizes color, but whatever. Sometimes there's a certain beauty in a lack of color. Not in this case, but sometimes. The Nikon FM3A uses F-mount lenses, of which, of course, there is literally a humongous catalog to pick from. On the FM3A that day in Texas, I was using my Nikkor 35mm 1.4 lens with a warming filter and a polarizer. It's a pretty good lens. The first of its kind, if I understand correctly. It's even good enough to be used in space, I believe. It's definitely sharp for sure, but don't ever think of shooting it wide open like I do later in this video. Shoot doubles. F**k money. I think the first one was better. Oh yeah, that shutter slap brings back some warm memories. Like, I don't know. The sound of Rook to C7 slamming on the chessboard and yelling checkmate and glorious victory making the 11-year-old that I was playing cry. Yeah, I could get used to this camera. There is no autofocus on this camera either. Not that I would need it because I shoot film and need to remain pure. And yeah, this lens doesn't have an autofocus motor. Inside the viewfinder is the typical split prism that I use to confirm focus because the lens is wide open when you focus and only ever closes down the moment you trigger the shutter. Or I guess when you use the stop down lever, but no one ever actually uses that, right? Anyway, out there looking like Yul Brynner. Not that anyone will actually understand that reference. It was time to move on as the clouds rolled in, but worry not. It was the perfect excuse to shoot some 100 ISO film inside an old dark church. If these 1.4 lenses could handle the void of space, a dimly lit black mold infested church that no human should probably be inside of should be a cakewalk. All right, we got to go manual on this one. It's backlit. It's giving me like one eighth. Okay. All right, here goes nothing. One fourth of a second at 1.4. This shot is actually fantastic. The colors are awesome and it isn't, I guess, too astigmatized out the ass for a wide open 1.4 lens from 1969. Whereas these other shots at 1.4 kind of are. I hesitate to call the Nikon FM3a a completely manual camera, but it's like one step away from it. Believe it or not, through some engineering marvel, the internals are almost completely mechanical, which is insane for a camera that can do one four thousandth of a second, but it is not without some flaws. One fifteenth of four. Oh boy. Technically speaking, this shutter is what you'd call a hybrid shutter that was actually featured in several cameras of the era from different brands. It's pretty complex, apparently. I asked my repair guy, Gus, how these hybrid shutters hold up over time and he was, I guess, less than enthusiastic about their long-term reliability, preferring the fully mechanical alternatives such as the Nikon F2 or FM2n. So I guess think of the hybrid shutter as like the hybrid dinosaur in Jurassic World. It's sick as hell and Scarlett Johansson is there for some reason, but yeah, it'll probably kill you. All right, finished one roll of E100. Now I just have to figure out how to rewind this thing because I can't remember. Got some more E100 here. Some Eastman E100. Thank you to Tim Ryugo for sending that over. Thank you to Eastman. Thank you to Kodak. Whoops, sunglasses are on now. I swear every time I try to load film on camera, it just does not go super smoothly. Furthermore, because of the nature of this complex hybrid shutter, you don't need a battery to operate the camera. Every shutter speed is available. No power required. You will need a battery, however, to operate the light meter, which in turn talks to the auto shutter speed function. So those will be inoperable without power. Here's a photo of a lactose intolerant person's worst nightmare. Dairy everywhere. No toilet in sight. The A in Nikon FM3a stands for automatic, I believe, of which there is an auto shutter speed mode, making this camera aperture priority if you want it to be. This is actually what I consider to be one of the most valuable aspects of the Nikon FM3a, even if it kills it in the long term. The setting makes it quite fast to shoot, which can be ideal when you're, you know, a scared little photographer squatting in an old auto body shop by the highway. I do love that this camera remains mostly manual, but takes away one of the three points of the exposure triangle and does the thinking for you. If for nothing else, it means you don't have to take your hand off the lens ever to adjust the shutter speed. And believe it or not, that's kind of valuable. I shot pretty much this whole video, you know, with a few exceptions on the auto mode on the camera. It just makes things a little bit easier, you know. An added bonus, the light meter in the viewfinder will tell you what shutter speed the auto mode is planning on using ahead of time. So you can, I guess, review it and, you know, don't accidentally end up using something like one eighth of a second and getting dragged. And perhaps best of all, like an ignition breathalyzer, Nikon installed an auto lock on the shutter speed dial that you'll need to firmly press to get it out of auto mode, thus disabling any accidental bumping of the shutter dial to the wrong setting. Check this out, you'll never believe it in a million years, the sun came out. All right. Oh, it's so good. Lighting is perfect. These shots of this house with the old car are incredible. Sure, it's probably just the lighting being, you know, about as good as it gets and not so much the photographer, but whatever. I still had to expose properly. Actually, the camera did that for me. So yeah, I guess I didn't do ****. Aside from the lens mounting the opposite direction from most cameras, this camera also does the other usual Nikon thing where you need to pop the film advance lever out to turn it on. Not romantically or anything like that, unless you want it to be. I guess it's better than having to hit a button all the time, but it does take some getting used to for sure. Just when I thought I was done and I find this comp, it's pretty good. Um, we want to go in, but we've lost the light and there's an owl that lives in there and owls are usually pretty angry. So I think we're just going to leave it alone. We just missed the light cutoff point here. So I think we might stay in this town and come back first thing tomorrow morning. It is also getting a little bit dark, so we'll probably explore the inside a little bit more tomorrow too. It does say butthole in there, so that's kind of cool. So we parked our asses up at a nearby hotel for the night and got some ice cream for dinner because when in Texas, we are free men. Want to go in or you want to go through the drive-thru? Drive-thru. I don't want them to see my face. They'll know. They'll know this is the Fourth DQ in four days. And we can do whatever we want when our girls aren't around. I'm gonna ask for a side of ranch. The next morning, harboring the stomach ache of the century for some reason, we hit sunrise in a nearby town, but there was quite a large difference in exposure between the shadows and the sunrise light. This is a tricky situation for any photographer or camera. When in doubt with Ektachrome, I prefer to expose for the highlights, which really just led me to think of the only thing that I could to complain about on this camera. That there's no way to lock exposure in auto mode. When you're in that mode, it continuously reads exposure information and makes adjustments. But lo and behold, my dumb ass didn't even realize that there's an AE lock button here, right where your thumb goes. Hold that down like you're drowning it and the exposure in auto mode will lock in. You can reframe your image to your heart's content. And this camera won't get in your way creatively. They really thought of it all on this one. Waiting for the light on this building to get a little bit better. A little more, uh, filled out. Might be here for another hour. Almost there. Just want the light to hit the bottom of the doorframe right there. Maybe like five more minutes. This is the, more or less, the comp I'm thinking. It's nice. I look nice on the X-crown with the polarizer. Choo-choo, motherf***er. Let's see, what else did I miss? You set the ISO of your film over here by the rewind dial. You just lift up the ring and lock it into place. It goes from about 12 ISO for the psychopaths out there that shoot that stuff. All the way to 6400 for the other psychopaths out there. But yeah, I mean, with exposure compensation, right here it's really 3 ISO to 25,600 ISO. So good luck with all that. You won't catch me on that type of bullsh**. There's also a DX code function if you're too lazy to set the ISO yourself. That's that. And like usual, when you're done with the roll, you just gotta hit that rewind button on the bottom plate and, you know, crank it back. It's all pretty standard by-the-book stuff, to be honest. There aren't too many complications on this thing. Lastly, this camera takes a CR1 battery, which tastes fine, I guess. CR1s are really more of a side dish than the main course, but that's just my opinion. Don't burn me at the stake for it. And there's a little tab over by the film advance lever that is the double exposure lever. But I super don't give a sh** about that and super glued that hoe down because I'll never do a double exposure as long as I may live for the next two months or so. I guess the good news about it is that it's so out of the way. You never really accidentally bump it or anything during a normal use. I forgot it was even there to begin with. But what you never forget is a classy website, am I right? Let's take a minute and thank today's sponsor, Squarespace, for their ongoing support. Chances are you've heard of the industry-leading Squarespace before, but you know the team behind the website building powerhouse recently implemented a bunch of tools that utilize groundbreaking AI to custom build the website of your dreams. Are you a photographer like me looking to show off your work? Get started doing so with hundreds of professionally designed templates. Time to take your work a step further? Sell some prints and use Squarespace's own AI to power things that are normally kind of a drag to do yourself, like product and video descriptions as well as email campaigns. It's designed to take some of that load off when crafting your new website workspace to allocate other resources like time and critical thinking to other more important components of your online presence. Proprietary tools like design intelligence can help you get a long way because they utilize groundbreaking artificial intelligence to not only perfect but personalize your new website down to every last cutting-edge detail. And on the topic of selling products, Squarespace even features preset payment infrastructures to start the inflow of economy to you in exchange for goods or services. If you've ever dreamed of making profits, Squarespace has you covered with payment methods such as Klarna, Direct Debit, Apple Pay, Afterpay, and even ClearPay. So what are you waiting for? If you're ready to build a website, you can start a free trial today at squarespace.com slash grainydays. And if you use the code grainydays at checkout, you can get 10% off your first purchase. The light finally broke. So am I going to keep the Nikon FM3A? Which I can only assume stands for... Yeah, manual three times is awesome. Yeah, of course. I've already taken some of the best photos of my career on it. You know, that and I have a plethora of Nikkor lenses that somehow seem to mysteriously double overnight like space triples. You probably won't get that reference either. With all these features packed into such a small and light body, with all the buttons kind of just perfectly placed where they need to be, it kind of tells us all we need to know. This camera was at the top of the food chain for Nikon before digital took over. It's the culmination of decades of camera design, research, and know-how that accumulated into this hybrid shutter beast you see before you. Yeah, someday it'll jam up on me. And yeah, it's not flashy or even pretty, but it's the best 35mm camera I think that's ever been made. Of course, that definition is highly subjective depending on the photographer, but it doesn't matter. They're wrong. If aperture priority and auto shutter speed don't matter to you, then yeah, that's fair. Whatever. There are probably better cameras out there for you long term. For me though, and for what I do, this camera is peak film camera. And I understand now why it costs what it does. Likely because it's the only camera you'll ever need. Not me though. I'm still gonna keep buying sh**.