When I was a freshman in high school, I signed up for a film photography class thinking it would be a good excuse to spend a good part of the school week and some homework time getting to goof around with a camera.
Nowadays, I’m very fortunate that I get to legitimately call myself a full-time professional photographer, and have access to much of the state-of-the-art equipment I used to stare at, wide-eyed with wonder, through the counter at photography shops or in YouTube videos. I’m grateful for every job I get called for and every booking I take, and I absolutely love what I do, but at the end of the day, this is a job, make no bones about it.
No, I wanted old. As in, “basically as far removed from a Z9 as you can go in an SLR” old. So I settled on a bog-standard Nikon F2, without so much as a light meter, widely considered to be the final iteration of the fully mechanical professional Nikon SLRs. To go with it, I decided on a Nikkor-S.C. 55mm f/1.2, for a good “standard” focal length and a very wide maximum aperture.
Eagerly, I visited Paul’s Photo to pick out some film, settling on a few different stocks but really wanting to try out CineStill 800T for some night work. It just so happened that the next day, there would be a large classic car show at a local drive-in diner, replete with neon lights to let the film shine. So, for the first time in over a decade, I loaded a roll into my shiny new Nikon and set to work.I’m not going to lie, this was a bit of an intimidating experience for me.