Ode to an F2

and an elegy for elegance in interface design

I use the F2 throughout this essay to illustrate my points, because that's what I happen to own. It could equally have been a Nikon FE2 or a Canon AE-1 or a Pentax K1000 or ... )

Point

Nikon F2 (one of 816,000 made)

When I got hooked on photography in 2000 a wise counselor recommended I switch from the digital compact I was having trouble making sense of and buy myself a used all-mechanical 35mm SLR – use this until I mastered the fundamentals. Once, the unaffordable dream of thousands of serious photographers, a perfectly sound if slightly battered Nikon F2 languished behind the glass display in the used section of a local camera store, like a two-year-old Arabian race horse doing pony rides. I picked it up together with a couple prime lenses for less than half what I’d paid for the two megapixel digital compact (Olympus C-2020).

The C-2020 has since quietly expired of some mysterious electronic ailment, but the F2 is still ready to rumble with a 50/1.4 on the business end and a roll of 800 ISO sitting on frame 13 these last three or four years. It was made in 1972; for all I know it will still be going strong in another 35 years. My fingers miss the tactile satisfaction of cocking the film advance lever as much as the visceral pleasure of mechanical resistance then audible click when turning the aperture ring on the lens.

I’m not sure in what sense there has been real progress in camera design since 1972. Doubtless the game of baseball could be played with digitally enhanced bats that track the ball and guide themselves to make contact, while the balls could be self-guided miniature missiles that just as assiduously seek to avoid making contact with the bat. Obviously, no such "advances" have been made in baseball, not so much due to some deep and irrational conservatism, but because such advances would invalidate the entire logic of the game, that of a contest between human skill sets. Surely, some fish-seeking guidance mechanism could be built into the lure on the end of a fishing line, but again at the cost of the very essence of the sport.

I am not so dense as to fail to understand that the Nikon D3 that is today’s replacement to the F2 in Nikon’s line-up is in many significant ways simply a superior tool to the F2 for many professional tasks. The measure of a tool is its suitability to the task at hand. For a photojournalist and the newspaper that employs him, the D3 means being able to work without flash, not just in dim light but in practically no light. It means being able to create usable images without the frustrating delay of film development and chemical process printing.

It’s a grand thing that professional photojournalists can buy a D3 or 1DIII if they want to. But the vast majority of photographers are neither professionals nor photojournalists. (I suspect the vast majority of photographers are ashamed that they are neither professionals nor photojournalists, but that’s a story for another day.) Photography is a dialogue between photographer and subject. Just as a 1000 watt PA system does not noticeably improve most spoken dialogues, so not every new marvel of automation crammed into the guts of a camera improves the dialogue between photographer and subject, let alone between photographer and camera. Just having to consider whether to switch from continuous to single shot autofocus or whether to switch from matrix to spot metering distracts the photographer from establishing a rapport with both his camera and his subject.

F2 exposure (one of untold millions made)

The F2 has just four controls that are used during the course of a typical shooting session: film advance, focus, shutter speed, and aperture. Once your fingers learn to find those controls and learn the routine needed to adjust each of them without looking, photography can become a fully automatic process – not the automation of microcomputer built into camera, but the automation of human brain controlling camera as subconsciously as it controls a halfback’s footwork as he suddenly veers to avoid an intercept. When you have that level of rapport with a tool you have an advantage that may well trump eight frames per second, five frame auto bracketing, and forty spot autofocus.

Japanese electronics engineers have poured 35 years and doubtless some millions of man hours into auto exposure metering, but as yet I’ve seen no system that actually improves over the centre-weighted cadmium sulfide meter in the 1972 F2. Matrix/multi-pattern metering is so far actually a step backward, because it can and frequently does give wildly inaccurate exposures while giving the photographer no hint that anything is about to go south (see my exposé for more information). Chimp-and-re-shoot is not an option in all too many contexts; far better to use the supposedly quaint centre-weighted pattern, learn it until it becomes second nature, and never miss a shot.

Manual focus is hardly an option given today’s dim and diminutive finders and the low light levels modern cameras can work in. Nor was manual focus ever that successful, no matter how satisfying it may be to thumb the focus ring while studying the split prism image in the finder. But today’s autofocus, however much it may get the job done, and even after all these years in development, still represents a human interface disaster. Obviously, focal point selection should be a function of the focus ring on the lens, not of an awkward four point wheel on the back of the camera.

F2 exposure (another one of untold millions made)

The F2, as representative of early SLR design, was a clear advance over the preceding rangefinder in just enough ways to spell the rangefinder’s demise. But it’s own weaknesses are considerable: it takes up precious inches between lens and focal plane, playing havoc with wide angle lens design; mirror slap jars the camera at the very moment it should be most still; and the increased sound at shutter release is a serious obstacle in weddings, war zones, and wild life haunts. Yet in spite the pellicle mirror pointing the way, no one has managed to invent a mirror surface that is perfectly transparent under normal conditions yet goes instantly reflective when subject to a current.

In stark contrast to the F2, my whiz-bang new Pentax K20D has a feature list as long as this essay, and comes boxed with a 300 page manual. The vast majority of purchasers don’t opt for the K20D in spite of this complexity, but because of it. I have this mental image of the typical amateur photographer sitting in the cockpit of an airliner as a child, seeing the 10,000 different dials, and going "wow!" Sheer gadgetry is the very vision of heaven to perhaps the majority of the male of the species. But to anyone who is actually trying to use a camera as a serious tool, every additional option that cannot be ignored is a liability, not an advantage, every control that cannot be used with zero conscious intervention is a double liability, and every re-location or re-configuration of a control is little short of catastrophe.

Yet not every innovation has these downsides. The zoom lens does add another variable the photographer must keep track of, but as an interface it’s totally intuitive and quickly becomes second nature. Image stabilization is even better in that it requires zero attention from the photographer and is unalloyed benefit in all but the most arcane situations. DOF preview and the self-timer (both present on the F2) are there when needed and can present no distraction when not needed. Now that electronic imaging has surpassed film in so many aspects of image quality and convenience, it too weighs in on the plus side of the scale. But my right hand still pines away for the sensuality of the manual film advance. Not all criteria are rational criteria. The F2 may well come off the shelf and into my camera bag for a long stay again one day – in spite of the punishment in film scanning that move would consign me to.

Counterpoint

Pentax K20D (a thoroughly modern SLR)

All the points above are important ones, but there is another perspective. A modern dSLR has a bewildering array of options – but doesn't actually require you to use them or even consider them. Nothing stops me from setting my K20D to M for manual on the mode dial and centre-weighted on the metering dial. If I want to cheat, I can even press a certain button to set the shutter to the meter's recommendation for the current aperture as a starting point, thereby saving myself some effort when switching to a drastically different light level.

I can't regain my beloved manual film advance; but I can consider the far more comfortable battery grip of the K20D over the F2's unforgiving metal corners as a non-trivial compensation. I can't regain the F2's manual aperture ring; but the K20D's ability to control ISO/sensitivity as the third fundamental variable of exposure more than makes up for that.

The K20D (like all current dSLRs) still suffers from the same mirror box limitations the F2 did; and it's evaluative metering is as bizarre as any other contemporary camera's. But at least it has a built-in two degree spot meter, which the F2 could never have dreamed of.

Yet for all that, the F2 has a certain cachet that no computer-driven modern marvel can equal. We'll know the digital camera has finished evolving when you can set one down next to an F2 or similar mid-twentieth-century all-mechanical beauty and no longer find your hands reaching out to the F2 just to experience the sheer pleasure of handling the thing.