My First Rolls with an N80 (Part 1 of 2)

As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, my girlfriend left her Nikon N80 here. So it's fair game to use. On May 25th I ran three rolls through it -- one Foma 400 and two Walgreens color 400. I'm going to break this trip into two posts (in the interest of having five bog entries this week) and share the monochrome images today and the color ones tomorrow.

Only nine of the monochrome images turned out. Three of the 24 images had unforgivably bad compositions. A couple the auto-focus had automatically focused on the wrong thing, and a bunch were redundant or boring. Of the nine that turned out, six are blog-worthy.


Along San Francisco's northern shores, near Ghiradelli square, is a long quay that wraps around the northernmost piers. THis quay provides some great views of the city, Alcatraz, and especially the Golden Gate Bridge. Here is a shot of the protected marina, backgrounded by Alcatraz.


Here is the Golden Gate Bridge. You'll notice this image looks like I used a red filter. However, I had no additional filters. To achieve this effect, I used the camera's matrix metering (or whatever Nikon called it back then) and grabbed a reading off the clouds. That forces the clouds, which the sun shone through, to be the middle tone (zone four or five on the zone scale.) The sky was comparatively darker, as was the water, yielding less light to the film during exposure. That resulted in this faux-red-filter look. A nice result, mostly.


A fisherman.


The view back toward Telegraph Hill and Coit Tower.


The San Francisco skyline.


Someone making great use of a lovely and windy day.