Nikon F-301 / Nikon N2000: Beeper and the Motor Drive

In a few days' time The White Stripes' "Fell in Love with a Girl" will be fifteen years old. It wasn't their first single, but it was the first I remember seeing on television. You remember the video. It was made with Lego pieces. Little Lego pieces. Little stop-motion Lego pieces. Little stop-motion Lego pieces, moving and stopping and moving and stopping.

Moving, constantly moving, and constantly stopping. A whirling mass of plastic brought to life by invisible hands. Moving, stopping, moving, and stopping. Little Lego pieces. Today we're going to have a look at the Nikon F-301, a 35mm SLR that was sold in the United States as the Nikon N2000, although nowadays everybody calls it the Nikon F-301, except that no-one calls it anything because no-one remembers it or cares about it. Constantly moving and stopping, moving and stopping.

1985. That's when it came out. 1985. Nikon sold it alongside the F-501 / N2020, which was the same camera but with an autofocus motor. Autofocus was a big thing back then, but there was still room in the market for a manual focus camera. In November 1985 Popular Photography had a look at the F-301 and concluded that it was okay, I guess, although the reviewer basically describes the camera without passing judgement.

Check out the font in that article. It's a good example of a proportional font, e.g. the letter I in NIKON is much narrower than the letter O - but also check out how the letter O actually pushes into the cleft of the K. It's ITC Avant Garde Gothic. That's the name of the font. ITC Avant Garde Gothic.

Notice how the zeroes in N2000 overlap. Technically the official camera sponsor of the 1984 Olympics was Canon, but perhaps Nikon wanted to make people mentally associate Nikon with the Olympic games without saying so explicitly. I don't know. Fonts, eh? You can say a lot with words, a lot with spaces, a lot with the shape of words.

Nikon sold the F-301 as an entry-level beginner's camera, although compared to the later F-50 and F-70 it feels much more substantial. A few years later it would have been mid-range. The top plate is apparently made of plastic, but the chassis is metal, and overall the F-301 is heavier and more solid than I expected. Benoît Pioulard's music is fantastic. He's an ambient-indie musician (technically Benoît Pioulard is a "project" - his real name is Thomas). Pioulard's ambient music mostly sticks to a rigid formula of evolving, distorted drones, but it sounds lovely:

"Sonic sculpture" is a cliche, but in this case it's true, Pioulard's songs are like blocks of sound built to be contemplated at length, or moods that slowly pass through you. Until recently I assumed that ambient music was the entirety of his bag, but he has also made jangly indie pop and even ambient folk. Last year he broke his wrist! Unfortunately this incurred hefty medical costs. If only he had flown across the Atlantic to the UK, where he could have had the surgery for free, except that they won't let you fly if you have a broken wrist, but perhaps he could have hidden it in a big glove.

Nowadays the F-301's design smells of the 1980s. Check out that red stripe. The tasteful thickness of it. In those days it was fashionable to ask Porsche Design or Giorgetto Giugiaro to have a go at designing camera bodies. The F-301 looks like something by Porsche or Giugiaro but apparently it was designed in-house.

F-301s are available on eBay for pennies. They have no real antique value. As with the early Canon EOS cameras the body is slightly more upmarket than it appears. I bought one so I could try out my 28mm f/2.8 AI-S on a period-correct AI-S-enabled Nikon film camera, but also I was curious about this underdog. The F-301 is in the odd position of having a poor reputation - or at least a vague air of failure and pointlessness - entirely because it has no reputation at all. In its day it did nothing wrong, but it was neither a cute old antique or a high-performance modern camera, although it has some modern features.

AI-S, for example. AI-S was Nikon's early-80s attempt to bring multi-program automatic exposure to their film cameras, but instead of using electronic circuits the system used a mechanical coupling. I wrote about it in this post, when I covered the Nikon 28mm f/2.8 AI-S. It was very limited, and only a handful of cameras used it, but the lenses are highly prized today because they were optically very good and built to a higher standard than the early Nikon AF range. The F-301 was one of only four cameras that supported AI-S, although in practice it's only relevant if you use 135mm-or-longer telephoto lenses and want to have a high-speed program mode.

With an AI 20mm f/3.5

Spec-wise the F-301 resembles the Pentax A3, Canon T70 and so forth. It uses Nikon's AI lens mount; it's manual focus only; it has DX film coding and electronic film advance, but manual rewind; it has a non-standard "PPhiAM" exposure wheel, oddly without S; it takes four AAA batteries, or four AA batteries with an optional baseplate.

I have this baseplate, and with four Eneloops the F-301 lasts forever. Which is good, because it's dead weight without batteries. It doesn't have a backup mechanical shutter speed, but even if it did there would be no way to wind the film on. Unlike some motor-equipped cameras it shoots until it detects film tension rather than stopping at exactly 36 frames, so a few of my rolls had 37 exposures. When you insert film it winds on with three quick shots.

The F-301 has a beeper that beeps if the shutter speed is too slow. You can turn it off. The beeper and the motor drive are very loud.

The camera was sold as an entry-level model, but it still has some of Nikon's professional heritage. You need to press a small button before you can twist the exposure dial; ditto rewind. The motor drive runs at an unusually fast 3.5fps.

Beyond the AA baseplate there were no special accessories. No handgrip, no dedicated speedlight (the F-501 had the SB-20), no underwater case etc.

The full caption is "black dudes, you can avoid the rain drops if you smoke".

So the story goes, during the making of The Fifth Element director Luc Besson came up with an imaginary alien language for Milla Jovovich's character, and by the end of filming the pair of them were so proficient in this language that they could have entire conversations. Humanity developed language for sound practical reasons, but to what extent does language shape our consciousness? I have no idea, but the F-301 is something of a bargain on the used market. Historically it was quickly overshadowed by Nikon's new autofocus cameras. In the 1990s and 2000s it was never prized by the cult camera crowd, who instead gravitated towards Nikon's older manual focus SLRs such as the EM and F3.

On a technological level the F-301 is objectively more advanced than the F3, but the F3 has a much better viewfinder. The viewfinder is the F-301's biggest weakness. It feels cramped and I have to jam the camera against my face to see all of it. It's a shame because the other reason I bought an F-301 is because it's one of the newest Nikon cameras with a split-image viewfinder.

It uses centre-weighted metering, with a large circle in the viewfinder illustrating the metering bias. I have to admit that I've only shot negative film with it, so I can't comment on the accuracy of the metering system; it didn't stand out in any way, which I suppose is a good thing.

My F-301 was actually broken when it arrived - the mirror and shutter were jammed - but after a bit of poking it started working again, so top marks to Nikon's early-1980s engineers. It continued to work and as of 2019, when I went through this post to take out some of the swear words, it continues to work. I know this because I've just tried it. In the 1990s Nikon embraced cheapness to an alarming extent but the F-301 was perhaps the last gasp of old-school we-need-to-make-a-cheap-camera-but-we-have-standards Nikon.

If you want to experiment with film photography and old Nikon manual focus lenses the F-301 is an interesting value proposition. It can't depreciate any more, the only issue is liquidity, but you have to ask yourself if you'd rather fulfil a childhood dream and buy an F4 instead. But then again the F-301 has a split-image viewfinder as standard whereas with the F4 split-image was an option. The F-501, FA, and EM are logical alternatives, the EM in particular because it's small and cute, and that's about that for the F-301.

Vivitar 70-150mm f/3.8: Ducks are Birds

Let's have a look at the Vivitar 70-150mm f/3.8, an old zoom lens from the late 1970s that takes up very little space in a travel bag. Here's what it looks like:

The creatures we become / will visit distant suns / and find to their dismay / that they are all the same

The coating is an attractive red-purple-amber colour.

Vivitar sold it for all the popular camera mounts of the day. It pops up in camera magazines of the late 1970s and early 1980s, often sold alongside a 2x teleconverter. Vivitar's adverts claimed that the teleconverter was a specially-formulated "matched multiplier" that worked best with the 70-150mm, but it sounds like total balls.

Off to Monte Isola on Lake Iseo, which has sunshine and cats (pictured).

In common with other Vivitar lenses the 70-150mm was built by a third party, in this case Kiron. To confuse matters Kiron sold the lens under its own name as a 70-150mm f/4, and furthermore Vivitar sold two different 70-150mm f/3.8 designs - the first had separate focus and zoom rings, my version has a one-touch pushy-pully-twisty control. Despite being roughly thirty years old the pushy-pully-twisty zoom ring on my model doesn't flop about.

It was a sunny day and I had the luxury of stopping down to f/8, which is easy on lenses. At f/8 the 70-150mm has very little vignetting and none of the "glow" typical of 1970s zooms. There's a bit of pincushion distortion at 150mm.
The colours are fine, again without the obvious washed-out quality of 70s zooms, but hard to judge given that I was shooting expired Ektachrome, which had a purple cast, and furthermore atmospheric haze made everything look slightly blue. Which I compensated for in Photoshop, although in this case I think I amped up the colour a bit too much.

But was I blue? I was not blue because Lake Iseo is a happy place. This is a 100% crop from the middle, scanned at 2400dpi with an Epson V500. A dedicated film scanner could probably get more detail out of the original negative.

Short, relatively fast tele-zooms were a fad in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Zoom lenses had been around for a few decades but they really started to become popular in the 1970s. The typical 80-200mm f/4 lens of the day was however very bulky, and there was a gap in the market for shorter models that could replace an 80mm and 135mm portrait lens. The Olympus 70-150mm f/4 was an early example, launched as part of the OM range in 1974; by the end of the decade there were loads of third-party short zooms, which nowadays clutter up eBay. Nikon's relatively large 75-150mm f/3.5 Series E is quite fondly remembered.

Monte Isola is a fun day trip, or two-day stay if you want to catch the sunrise. The island itself is pedestrianised - the locals get about on scooters and Piaggio Apes - and although there isn't much to do beyond walk around and eat, what's wrong with that?

On the whole 70-150mm zooms fell between two stools, too slow for indoors and too short for the outdoors. If you want to photograph birds, cats, ducks and so forth - and I realise that ducks are birds, perhaps I could have said hedgehogs instead - you have to get right up close to fill the frame at 150mm, which is risky.

About a year later I got hold of a Kodak DCS 14n, a Nikon-mount, 14 megapixel full-frame camera from the early 2000s. Whilst trying it out I used this lens, and here are the test shots. Firstly in the middle at 150mm, f/3.8 and then f/8, no sharpening:

As you can see it goes from mediocre to okay. In the corners it is at least consistent, again at f/3.8 and then f/8:

If I take the last image and correct the CA and apply sharpening it's actually not bad:

I won't bore you with any shots at 70mm because it's basically the same; unspectacular wide open in the middle with lots of vignetting, decent at f.8. If I was giving the lens marks out of ten I would give it a couple of extra marks for being so small and handy.

The bokeh isn't particularly smooth although I have seen worse.

The range makes more sense for tigers, cows, horses, and people, for whom you can zoom in to 150mm for a head and shoulders portrait and zoom out to 70mm for an upper body shot.

This was shot with a 20mm. In the absence of the Christo and Jeanne-Claude organisation the only practical way to reach Monte Isola is by ferry.
The island pictured in the poster (and at the top of this article) is the Isola di San Paolo, which is also accessible by ferry albeit that it's privately-owned. Google Street View has some images taken during the fortnight that The Floating Piers was in situ:

The inhabitants of Monte Isola string up the bodies of dead fish in these execution racks, facing the lake, "pour encourager les autres".

It seems that only Tamron made a short f/2.8 zoom, and it was a special soft focus model that sold in tiny quantities. With a 2x teleconverter the Vivitar 70-150mm becomes a 140-300mm f/8, which is very slow. My hunch is that unless it is an extraordinarily bright day, it would be better to ignore the teleconverter and just enlarge the photograph, or get closer, or put the camera away and just savour the moment.

70-150mm zooms don't have a direct modern equivalent; their heirs are image-stabilised, plastic-bodied 70-300mm f/4-5.6 designs, which have a more useful range but are much more conspicuous. It's funny the things that stick with you. For most of my adult life I have carried the words "beep cleep chimney" in my head. They come from this sketch, from Alas Smith and Jones:

Strictly speaking it was just "Smith and Jones" when they moved from BBC2 to BBC1.

A bunch of dinner party guests are playing charades. The joke is that instead of picking "vertical assembly building" or "Schleswig-Holstein question", their senile uncle has picked "beep cleep chimney", which doesn't make sense.

The sketch is cleverly constructed. There's an initial laugh at the realisation that the answer is beep cleep chimney, which sounds inherently funny; then there's a second laugh when we cut to the senile uncle, because (a) we suddenly realise why such an unlikely combination of words were picked and (b) Mel Smith looks stupid. The sketch is cruel and funny. All humour stems from violent subversion; the sketch subverts our expectations of charades, then dabbles in absurdism, which is yet another form of subversion.

The lens focuses closely enough to be used as a 1:4 macro. This is an Olympus Stylus Epic shot with a Fuji S5 at 150mm, f/11.

Alas Smith and Jones belongs to a generation of British television sketch shows that was supplanted if not exactly made obsolete by the dark realism of The Day Today and latterly the likes of Peep Show and That Mitchell and Webb Look. Smith plays the senile uncle as a broadly comic village idiot, but a modern take on the same material would portray the character realistically, ending the sketch on a sour note. The humour would then derive from our discomfort at the fact we are laughing at a mentally ill old man. A similar idea was the basis of Mitchell and Webb's final sketch, in which a senile Sherlock Holmes tries to force coherent thoughts through the fog of dementia.

For British television sketch shows the 1980s was akin to the Bronze Age of American comics. Russ Abbot and Cannon and Ball had huge ratings, but the more sophisticated likes of Not the Nine O'Clock News, Alas Smith and Jones, Victoria Wood As Seen on TV, and French and Saunders also attracted millions of viewers, bringing elements of the new Alternative Comedy to mainstream attention. The Vivitar 70-150mm f/3.8 is neat, albeit that the range is very short. The Nikon version is particularly handy if you have a posh Nikon body, because it mounts and meters natively; Alien: Isolation has one of the best soundtracks of any