Turns out they got it right in 1959 (Nikon F)

[Rol_Lei Nut]

The Nikon F is a great camera no doubt, as I've stated it's my main 35mm camera, I am astonished that the modern Zeiss lenses are not Nikon 1960's equal, but then very few lenses are.

Dominik

As far as build quality alone goes, the nicest lesnes I've seen are Pentax Takumar, the various Schneider & Voigtländer lenses in Bessamatic & Retina Reflex mount, Leica and then Nikon (pre-AF).
My Zeiss for Rolleiflex lenses are sometimes pretty well built and sometmes pretty shoddy...

[Alan Klein]

The pics are very nice. How did you scan them?

[philosomatographer]

The pics are very nice. How did you scan them?

Thanks! These are scanned 8x10in darkroom prints. Rather quickly done (on resin-coated multigrade paper), many of them could do with some more interesting manipulation.

[Jerevan]

I'd love to try an F (have the F2 - my favourite camera) but prices locally are close to ridiculous. I agree on the 105/2.5 (a bit sad about selling my P version) and the 50/2 Nikkor-H is a fantastic everyday lens.

[2F/2F]

For years I smugly looked down upon the grand daddy of modern SLRs - the Nikon F - as a large and noisy beast which could not possibly compare with the finesse that I was used to with my Olympus OM cameras.

You were an idiot...and an @$$hole! Welcome to a real camera.

[philosomatographer]

You were an idiot...and an @$$hole! Welcome to a real camera.

Ouch!! Unfortunately this real camera does not have compact 21mm f/2.0 or 250mm f/2.0 lenses that fit it like Olympus does, and somewhat noisier, but it is nice indeed... And it makes up for it with other very interesting lens choices.

[L Gebhardt]

I would be excited about the new camera too if I got that many nice prints off of the first roll. Good job there, for you must take most of the credit. I've had what I think is the same experience with some new hardware, where it all comes together on the first roll and you think wow this camera/lens is great. Then the next ones might be back to your normal percentage of keepers and you realize it was really you, and not the new equipment.

As for your comments about bokeh, I find it to be one of the most important features of fast lenses. Why buy a fast lens if you aren't going to use it wide open, after all they all look about the same at f/8. And if it's used wide open you need to be concerned about how it renders the whole scene, and not just the focal plane. But that doesn't mean I only like the perfectly creamy kind of bokeh. In your first image of the car with the bent antena the jittery bokeh adds a nice energy to the image, almost as if it's a live scene with motion in the background. In a shot of a pretty face or a flower it might not work so well.

[Ian Grant]

The Nikon F was a late runner, the grand-dadies of all 35mm SLR's were wmade in Dresden. 3 companies were at the forefront Exacta, followed by Zeiss and then under it's new American owner, Chales Noble, KW with the Praktiflex in 1939.

While Exacta made a system camera before WWII it was KW with the introduction of their Praktina cameras in 1952 who inroduced the first truly modern full prodessional 35mm SLR with accesories like a motor drive, 400ex back etc.This was later due to be upgraded as the flagship Pentacon Super.

If East German build quality had been better then the market today might have been very different. The first SLR available for sale with TTL metering was a Prakticamat beeting the Spotmatic into the shops by a few months.

Nikon however had built their reputation on their lenses and rangefinder cameras and the first adverts for the Nikon F in the UK are alongside the Nikon S3 and SP.

Ian

[Les Sarile]

Dude, my daily cameras are an Olympus OM-3Ti, a Leica M3, a Mamiya RB67, and a Linhof Technika. I have quite a broad perspective I believe... They are each a bit better at something than the Nikon F, yet I have never had such a percentage of perfectly focused quickly-made images than with the Nikon F.

Maybe the next acquisition should be an AF body like a Nikon F4/F5/F6 or Canon EOS-1/1N/1V? All have 100% viewfinders, excellent AF and can achieve very high frame's per second. These are the ultimate 35mm film bodies that can surely help you burn through rolls of film and give you a higher percentage of perfectly focused quickly made images . . .

Seriously, the enthusiasm is contagious and I look forward to seeing more from your F.

[jp498]

Why is it that these days, people seem to care more about the out-of-focus ares in an image than the in-focus areas? Strange trend started by internet forums... I wish the word "bokeh" had never been uttered. I used to care about this too, but I have resolved to not obsess about it so much anymore - it really is the subject matter that counts...

Of course, I agree - the 50/2.0 seems to sometimes have incredibly harsh out of focus rendering. But so what! On the other hand, the 105/2.5 seems absolutely delightful in all circumstances in this respect.

I care about the rendering of the out of focus areas because it's part of the image. And someone intentionally making photos should not ignore the rendering of a large part of the image.

If you're an f64 type, bokeh means little. If you're doing portraits or otherwise shooting wide open it's important. I've got 5 different "normal" lenses (Nikon, Nikon, Sigma macro, Nikon macro, and Voigtlander). I'm thinking of selling one to get a cheap soviet lens for yet another bokeh option. Each produces different results. I think of bokeh in nature photos (which typically have complex backgrounds) as the sort of painting brush style or instrument (trowel, big brush, little brush, sponge, airbrush) for painting the background. Each aperture is different, and I shoot a bunch of apertures to get what I'm after, as results vary depending on how much the final image is magnified and with the light's contrast. Sometimes the hard lines are just right, other times I want a mushy airbrushed background.

With a different name, Russ Young attributes discussion of the topic to the 19th century photographer Peter Henry Emerson, then Coburn and George Bernard Shaw in 1911. (p165 of Young's thesis) Part of the goodness of pictorialism is how things slowly go out of focus, rather than the thin defined plane we have in our 50mm's wide open. The downside of a wide band of focus is that it's hard to find focus initially because it's not a crisp in/out of focus. Printing is even harder unless you have a grain focuser.