The Body Is Willing Long After the Mind Is Gone

I have a beautiful Nikon FA 35 mm film camera. At the time of its release, 1983, it was touted as one of the most sophisticated Nikons ever. The FA was our introduction to Matrix metering. The SLR featured multiple exposure modes including full program. It was a marvel of technology.

Unfortunately, that part about technology, isn’t the case for mine.

As beautiful as my silver and black Nikon is, it can’t read a scene to save its life. In Program mode, everything looks the same to its silicon eye. It chooses the same shutter speed for a midday landscape as it would for a moody interior shot. And both would be wrong.

But I didn’t have the heart to let her go.

The funny thing is, in manual exposure mode, all of her shutter speeds are accurate. So if I set 1/15th of a second on the top dial, that’s what I got. The same was true for 1/4000th and everything in-between. And she sounded good at every one of them. Really good.

How could I let her go?

I couldn’t.

One morning, I loaded a roll of Kodak Tri-X and captured a series of cat portraits. (The pandemic will push one to such activities.) I used my iPhone as a light meter. It wasn’t convenient using the two devices in tandem, but I had to find out if the camera was…