andrewd01 wrote:
When I got my first F3 in 1992 I did f%ck up a film load the first time. I didn’t push the film leader in deep enough in the take up spool and it didn’t take. Lesson learned and never happened again.
It is certainly not the type where you just lay the leader over and close the back, you have to feed it in to the slot in the take-up spool.
Yes, the F4 you just lay it over and close the back and it auto advances to frame one. The F3 you do have to physically push it in, and when you're in a hurry or in very low light it was all too easy to think you pushed the leader in enough but you didn't, and even though I was hyper aware of it after the first time, it still happened more than once. The FM/FE were never as troublesome.
My big problem with Nikon back then was actually lens quality, and actually wide angle lens quality, which was dubious at best and would crop up in landscape photos with the venerable and generally highly regarded 24mm 2.8 AIS which had just horrible field curvature giving the illusion of greater depth of field as the plane of sharpness curved in back toward the camera but leaving the sides at infinity woefully soft. All of their wides back then had similar deficiencies. The telephotos were much better.
I share your dislike for the highly regarded 24 and 28 AI-S lenses for exactly the same reasons you mentioned. They were particularly troublesome if not stopped down and if you needed uniform sharpness at infinity. Remember, back in the day they were touted for their CRC (close range correction) and strength at close focusing.
Now I have to admit that I've made that F3 film loading error. I was fishing for marlin, no luck that day but we found our way into a giant school of tuna about 1 mile long and 1/2 mile wide that were being fed-on by a school of porpoise. We ran back and forth over that school all afternoon and boated more tuna than I've ever seen. That school of porpoise ran along side our small boat as we pulled-in tuna all afternoon. When I got tired of boating tuna I turned my attention to the camera and shot a whole roll of Kodachrome 200 as the porpoise were running alongside our boat and jumping, with jumping porpoise as far as the eye could see. That roll of film was PURE GOLD -- until I got to the 38th exposure.
That's the kind of misteak that I'll only make ONCE. ONCE.
