An EM is Enough.

This is my lightest camera. Yet Nikon designed it to be durable. Based on a metal frame made of copper silumin aluminum alloy, the EM shares the same material base as my F3. But the EM is a very stripped-down camera. Solely an aperture-priority camera, the EM is very easy to use -- set an aperture and click. The EM automatically assigns a shutter speed from one second to 1/1000th. For me, this was not an overly pleasurable camera.

It's light and I used my lightest lens on it, so it almost didn't feel like I had a camera around my neck. And the interface is intuitive and simple. The EM was designed as a beginner-level SLR, probably why I was not a huge fan, and was part of Nikon's "E" series of lenses. The Nikon E lenses were simple lenses with fewer elements and simple design. However, the E lenses are also very good and take great photos. I don't have any E lenses, so instead used the Nikon N70 kit lens.


f4. Flowers in a building's open space. This was a very nice, relaxing space with indirect light an a fountain that looked much like a flan.


1/60th, f4. I can't in any way fault this camera for image quality. It meters images well and returns good results. However, my copy of the EM has a couple holes in the light seals, the results of which you'll see in a few images.


1/125th, f11. Light reflecting from a building onto another.


1/125th, f11. A building reflecting off itself and its neighbor.


1/125th, f11. San Francisco south of Market Street.


1/500th, f5.6. I had to bburn in a great deal of the image's details down the center. You can see the muddyness in it. That's from the camera's light leak.


1/125th, f16. Again you can see dodging artifacts along the left side. Very frustrating.


1/30th, f16. You can again see two light leak dodging areas on this image.