Daniel Pietzsch

In Rome with the Nikon FE

At the beginning of December, Nicole and I went to Rome for a week. I took with me my Nikon FE film camera with 50mm lens and two black and white films. And I had a blast shooting with it.

It was not the only photographic equipment I brought along, of course. I also packed my trusty GF1 plus a few prime lenses. And I still shot more photos with the digital equipment. But it was the 30-year-old, simple film camera that I enjoyed way more. I didn’t really expect this and ended up shooting more than I originally planned to. So I had to buy one more (colour) film while we were there.

Been here for lunch. This was our waiter.

When I was out with the Nikon, I didn’t bring my GF1 and vice versa.

What made me like this setup so much, was a combination of its controls, the limitation of a single lens, the fact that it is a film camera, and its overall simplicity.

The controls are just fantastic. Instead of a mode-dial, which almost all modern cameras have, it has an aperture ring on the lens as well as a focus ring, a shutter-speed dial and a direct control to set the exposure compensation. That’s it. You can look at the top of the camera and can immediately see what its settings are. And — more importantly — you can set all the controls directly without looking at a screen and fiddling with tiny buttons. I really wonder why almost all cameras these days have a mode-dial, especially with enthusiast and pro models. I think, it’s wonderfully intuitive to set your camera with these old-school controls. It’s all you need, really.

I learned to love a manual lens on my GF1. But the 50mm lens translates to a 100mm equivalent on Micro Four-Thirds, which just isn’t that practical for me most of the time.

Another thing I noticed was, that I really like looking through a viewfinder. I missed this with my GF1, but it was while shooting with the FE, that I noticed just how much. I don’t know exactly why, but it feels different than composing via a screen. When you lift the camera to your eye and look at the actual world through an optical viewfinder, there’s a different connection to the world around you.

The constraints of this setup — shooting film and having one specific film loaded at a time, plus having a single focal length lens — really made me think more about what to photograph and how to photograph it. I was way more careful with composition. And at the same time it was very liberating not having to think so much about the settings or what lens to use. That was the setup and I had to cope with it. There was more focus on shooting than anything else.

When I was back, it was quite exciting for me to wait for the results. Having only shot one film with the camera before, I wasn’t even confident that the three films I shot turned out ok at all. But they did. And they look quite different to digital — in a good way.

Apart from the photos showing the cameras, all the photos were taken with a Nikon FE with 50mm E Series lens and Fuji Neopan 400 (b&w), Kodak Tri-X 400 (b&w) or Kodak GB 200 Gold (colour) films. Apart from occasional cropping and/or straightening, these photos are not post-processed and are displayed how I got them from the photo-lab.

More photos to come…