Nikon F3 immortolization
My Nikon F3 turned up yesterday and I have to say I’m seriously impressed with it (so far). It wasn’t all super-smooth though… I was out and about for all of about ten minutes before I spotted that the exposure lock button had simply fallen off! I forced Vlad and Xiao to spend about 20 minutes looking for it with me, but it’s pretty small and I had no idea exactly when it went missing. This was obviously broken when it arrived with me so I’ve contacted the Jessops eBay user about the issue… I really hope I can get something sorted, as (oddly enough) there were a number of times I could have done with it today (I had to resort to manual). The power also went a bit wonky at one point, but has been fine since then… my guess is that there was some residue on the battery or contacts, which has now been cleaned off properly. Either way, I’m not worried about this problem at all as the camera has a one-year warranty from Jessops, so I can have this repaired.
I headed out into town with a camera today for the first time in a good month. I don’t know why it’s been so long… the weather has been crap and I’ve not really been interested in getting out. After the rain today everything looked amazing… I’m really hoping that one or two shots will be absolutely great, but I suspect I might have technically cocked things up a bit—I’m still not too nifty with the old exposure compensation (not to mention that I still can’t quite get my head around this expose for shadows business).
I was hanging around outside the Arndale centre though and grabbed a photo of girl leaning on a wall waiting (I guess)... she knew what I was doing but made no reaction, so I figured I’d get another before moving on somewhere else. At this point some guy comes along and starts a conversation with her… so I get a photo of this (and I hope that will be pretty good too) but stay behind to get one more photo of just this girl. A minute later and the guy comes up to me and asks if I just took a photo of him, to which I replied: “sort of, you were in the photo but it was of the girl you were talking to.” This seems to piss him off and he starts to tell me I have no right, why didn’t I ask?, isn’t it rude, what are you taking photos for? I can’t actually answer any of these questions before he starts asking the next one until he finally demands that I “delete” it. This would be a fairly impressive task as I was shooting film, and tell him so. About now he tells me he is Muslim and that “nobody may immortalise him”, which I wasn’t expecting. I explain as nicely as I can that there is no way I can delete the photo because it is a roll of film. This time he demands I remove the whole film or he’ll smash it (my camera, I guess) up (which I’d love to see him try… it takes me a good few seconds to figure out how to open the film back and these F3s are famous for not breaking… they just sort of dent ;). After some more of this immortalization stuff (and a lot of swearing, which I’m sure a good Muslim shouldn’t be doing) I promise that I will get rid of the photo once it’s been developed. Unfortunately this isn’t good enough (he said so himself) and he threatens me and my camera some more before finally telling me his friends will sort it out for him. Well, I was fed up by this point, after trying to be as nice as I could about it so I told him I’d keep the photo as getting rid of it wasn’t doing anything for him, and walked off.
It didn’t (quite) finish there as he decided to walk by me and tell me I’m walking towards “the Lions’ den” (his friends) before suggesting that I give him “a few pounds to settle the matter” (which eventually changed to a pack of chips because he was homeless (and wearing a fairly expensive looking pair of trainers, hat and new Addidas tracksuit))... so much for that.
So everybody… yep, this photo will be appearing here once I get the roll of film finished, developed and scanned. That is, if it is any good ;)
Tags: photography