I Wanna go Analog

[djacobox372]

F100! has the build quality and button layout of a d300, but shoots film!

and I have a mint one I could sell you for $200; just pm me. I recently upgraded to an F5.

I'm also a big fan of the Fe--which you can buy for less then $100 on ebay.

 

[djacobox372]

No, I wouldn't suggest the FE. It only does shutter speed priority and won't ap. priority, which in a lot of cases really sucks. It's also really clunky and has a hard-to-read light meter.

WHAT??? The FE does aperture priority, NOT shutter priority; and it's dial light meter is the reason why people like it... The digital +/- crap in most other older nikons is annoying in that you can't tell how much you are over/under exposed just that you are.

"Clunky?" again that doesn't fit the FE, you must be talking about a different camera.

If you want an older manual focus nikon with all the bells and whistles, go for an FA, but I own both and my FA stays on the shelf. I like the FE because it's lighter, simpler, and has a light meter that is more informative.

If you want a modern autofocus, look into a f100, an f90s, or perhaps an f5 if you could afford it.

 

[djacobox372]

I totally support the idea of learning how to do the film thing. It's very cool, a great skill to have, always valuable to understand the roots of anything you want to do well, etc.

That being said...



I'm not sure you will find this true. I spent some time trying to learn with my old Canon AE1 and found it INSANELY frustrating and hard to learn with. You could expose an entire roll, and not get a single good shot... you would have to write down your exact settings somewhere for each shot to have ANY hope of remembering what it was you did and be able to correlate that to whatever you got in the end.

It took real effort to make sure you got your pictures exposed and developed asap so you could have the memory fresh in your mind of what the environment was like, etc.

You also had to deal with the possibility of your exposure being dead-on but having the person printing them screw the picture up royally at time of printing, skewing your impression of your results... unless you also feel like buying a negative scanner, which I recommend, but a good one is expensive.

All this vs. 1. click, 2. look, 3. "Oh wait, not quite, let me do that again."

Again, I support what you are doing, but I strongly question that it will make learning photography easier... much to the contrary, it will likely make it much harder and a much slower process than it would with digital.

Oh, and I speak from experience on this. I started learning on an AE1, and it was a frustrating experience to the point where I eventually gave up and pretty much waited for DSLRs to become affordable, and then I learned extremely rapidly from there.

Agree 100%, it's easier to learn on a digital... but after learning the basics the fact that film slows you down may aid further learning.

The real reason to go to film is for the "look" of film, which can't always be reproduced digitally. Another good reason is if you want to move into medium/large format photography, which would cost you $20,000 to do digitally, but only a couple hundred bucks to do with film.