Recently my dear wife was visiting her uncle, along with her parents. He’s “getting up there” in years and is not in the best of health, so they made the effort to go and spend some time with him and celebrate various birthdays that come around in the same month. They had a great time catching up and hanging out, and he had a variety of things he wanted to give to people. And one of those people is the humble curator of this website and what he wanted to share was a couple of old cameras. So my dear darling wife packed them up, along with some old film he had on hand, and hauled them back to yours truly. I wasn’t sure what was coming, but looked forward to their arrival.
After picking up my dear wife at the terminal we got caught up a bit on each other’s life since she’d traveled a few weeks before, and then she started unpacking – and handing me item after item. Today I’m going to be posting about “The Flagship” of the three cameras he sent. It is a mid-70’s Nikon F2 Photomic 35mm camera. It can be used 100% manually, or add a couple of 1.5v button batteries and you’ve got a built in light meter. I wasn’t sure what it was at first but a quick Duck Duck Go search yielded a lot of info and some images that made a positive identification fairly easy. It’s not like Nikon was cranking out a huge number of models like they’ve done in the digital era, they had a winner and stuck with it for about a decade, 1971 – 1980. The camera was a bit dusty from being stored for so many years, but mechanically it was solid. Digging around in “the drawer of mystery” yielded a pair of batteries that met the requirements. They were installed and the meter appears to work quite well. A bit of a dusting here and there and the camera seems to be in proper order. Next order of business will be to put some 35mm film in it and see what it can do. It’s been around 30 years, maybe more, since I last used an SLR film camera! Talk about “a blast from the past!”
So that’s a quick look at it. There’s another lens and accessory for it, but that will be fuel for a future post. Now to look around town and see who might be able to develop film now. There’s a scanner in storage that should handle the negatives once we get them.
To be continued…