Alameda Bayshore

The Nikon N70 is a lightweight, very user-friendly camera with a number of good features (though it notably lacks a few others.) It offers a number of great qualities: light weight (so it causes little or no neck fatigue), excellent metering (my copy routinely returns entire rolls with good histogram profiles), and a reasonably good autofocus feature (for those of you who use AF lenses -- you know who you are.)

The N70 is an AIS camera and has no obvious way to accommodate NAI lenses. One notable Internet camera expert claims NAI lenses can't even mount on the N70. Firstly, that claim is untrue. It warrants a user to use caution when using an NAI lens on an AI Nikon that has not been modified to accept NAI lenses, but at least for the N70 it's possible. So, once an NAI lens is mounted, can it be used? Yes. Can it be metered? Yes. Here's how:

1- Press the lens release and rotate the lens about 1/10th of a rotation until the shutter (which need to be set at the proper aperture) closes.
2- Take a meter reading and press and hold the auto exposure lock button.
3- Rotate the lens to lock it back in place, still holding the AEL button, and verify your focus.
4- Take your photos.

Alternately, you can take a meter reading, change the camera's mode to manual, set the shutter speed appropriately, and take your shot.

Now you can use your N70 for lots of old, great, suffixed Nikkor lenses! So, onto the shots. These all had a yellow filter to assist in contrast enhancement. Any post-processing will be noted.


1/100th of a second, f16. Chains alongside a park sidewalk. Even at the margins, the Nikkor-H captures detail and retains good image quality. This is a very well designed lens.


1/2,500th of a second, f2. This shot required some post-processing. The flower, being yellow, was exceedingly bright on the image. With the magic wand set at 55 and contiguous, I masked the flower. Then feathered it at 75 pixels, copied the selection, and pasted it on the image. I dropped the layer's gamma to about .15 and set the transparency at 75% or so.This resulted in sufficient detail within the flower.


1/80th, f11. Same process as above to correct some ultra-white areas, except that the wand was not set to contiguous. This resulted in vein detail in leaves that otherwise had no detail (about 15% of the photo.)



1/2,500th at f4. The cloud's center was a bit over-white, so it got the mask and gamma treatment, too. no other post-processing. I just like this because the sky came in extremely dark, which doesn't always happen with a yellow filter.


1/2,500th at f2.8. Post-processing included automatic contrast correction (which had almost no effect anyway.) My goal here was to make a "3-D" image where the grasses seemed to jump out of the picture. It's about halfway there. The Nikkor-H may not be a good lens for 3-D effects; it's too well engineered.


1.4,000th of a second at f2. This one had no post-processing at all. The goal was the same as above, but with less success.

This day's photos suffered from two hindrances: 1- I was in a new place and didn't know what to expect photographically and 2- I was more focused on learning how to use the NAI lens on the N70 that with photo composition. The latter being my own fault. But the N70, as is typical, returned great shots in terms of dynamic range, image quality, and tonality.