Nikon N80

For a while I've had a feeling that while a digital camera is certainly very convenient, it makes it all too easy to take photos without really concentrating on taking good photos. All to often I find myself taking a photo and then retaking it multiple times to improve it based on what I see in the LCD. That produces a lot of photos, and I still might not get a good photo since I focus on one thing at a time that needs to be fixed and forget about the big picture. For instance, I've often taken photos that I thought are well-composed, but have a crooked horizon. This shoot-and-refine cycle has another side-effect of increasing the number of photos I have to look through on my computer, and I don't really like spending more time than necessary doing that.

Thinking about what to do about this, I came to the conclusion that it might be worth trying film, since you can get a reasonable second-hand film camera fairly cheap nowadays. It's been at least 7 years since I last had a film camera and back then the cost of developing put me off using it much -- which is more of an advantage than a disadvantage for getting into a mindset of taking fewer photos. After thinking long and hard about it I bought a used Nikon N80 for about $90 a few weeks ago. The heavier, professional-level F100 is certainly attractive but at $250 it seems like an extravagance at this stage. With the 50mm f/1.8 lens I'd already bought for the D7000 and a roll of Kodak T-Max 100 film I was ready to go.

I set a goal of trying to take one photo of whatever caught my eye, and concentrate as much as possible on the composition and what I was including in the frame as I could before pressing the shutter. Taking 36 photos this way proved to be more frustrating than I expected, it took two trips on separate weekends to get through the whole roll! Here are some of the better ones:

Chrome and shadow

I took this photo and the next one on the Upper West Side. This bike caught my eye because I've recently been taking a lot of photos of reflected scenes, though in this one the reflection doesn't really come through except in the chrome at the bottom, which isn't really the focus. I took another photo with more chrome but this one turned out to be more interesting.

Luxury

This is one of the grand apartment buildings along West End Avenue. The tones came out much better than I was expecting, I was pleasantly surprised.

Solitude 

6th Avenue around 50th Street, where Midtown changes into corporate office buildings. I was drawn to the solitary guy sitting behind the fountain, but he is too small to really be a focus of attention. I wanted to have the lines parallel to the top and bottom edges of the frame but that would have put the man too close to the fountains of water.

Public art

Or maybe corporate art. The tones of the reflected light drew my attention here. I spent a long time in front of it trying to figure out how to frame it in a pleasing way.

Columbus Park

Chinatown is another one of the places that I go to when I can't think of what I want to photograph, since there's always something to see. This time I visited some parts I hadn't been to before, including Columbus Park, which was crowded with Chinese people on a Sunday. This game attracted a crowd of spectators, I waited for a while before I was able to get a clear shot of the guy concentrating on the board. The baseball cap wearer in the foreground was a distraction but there wasn't really any other way to take it.

Overall I'm pretty satisfied with the results and I'll definitely do it again, though I'll use T-Max 400 next time so that I can get a faster shutter speed. The tones on some of the photos are amazing, and the prints I got at Grand Photo Solutions have very nice contrast (I put the scans up here, which aren't as contrasty, but I increased the contrast a bit so they approximate the prints to an extent). The N80 is a very easy-to-use camera, since it's film there's much fewer settings to worry about and it's much lighter than the D7000 (of course a 50mm lens doesn't add much weight either). Filters complicate the picture a bit but for carefully composed shots it seems like it's going to be worth the effort. I don't foresee it displacing the digital camera, though! (aside from general convenience, it seems like it will be hard to reconcile it with the error-prone process of taking photos of people, though maybe that will come with more practice).