Nikon FA
I have several photog friends who will DM me with a “Hey! I’ve got this -mumblemumble- I’m looking to sell, want it?” Occasionally I say “no” but the general rule ends up being “mmmmaybe…?”
Bring it, what have you got?
“Nikon FA and a couple of sweet lenses. Fiddy bux.” Was his reply. This sent me to Google to ask: What is an FA? Nikon has a lot of lettersy cameras, the F, the FE, the FG, the FM, the EM, easy to lose track without prior experience. I have several Nikons, all of them auto-focus models, and I was interested to play around with a manual model Nikon. 50 bucks? Great price if all I was buying was the body, much less with two fantastic prime lenses. Not a difficult choice.
It’s a camera from the mid-80s, first to use matrix metering, it’s compact and it’s sturdy. Built with a copper-aluminum alloy chassis, it was fairly durable compared to other consumer-level cameras of the day. It was also, at the time, seen as Nikon’s most technologically-advanced manual focus camera.
Do I need this camera? No. No I don’t. Does it feel especially different from many of the other manual cameras in my collection? Not really, no. Do I like it anyway? Yeah, I kinda do. Are pseudo-conversational paragraphs that begin with a question and follow with an answer, rinse and repeat four more times just the most overdone and annoying thing outside of local car dealership commercials where the salesmen do all the acting? Sure are! Do I care? Umm, a little. Sorry. I’ll stop.
I loaded this compact performer up with some film and tucked it into my bike’s storage, and took a ride. I zipped up to Winooski, took the winding road to Mallet’s Bay, then continued along for awhile, stopping in Milton for a maple creemee, and back to Burlington. I took some photos here and there, and had a good time with it. So far I’ve not put more than a roll or two through it, but I have every intention of shooting more. It reminds me of the Canon A series cameras, even down to the removable finger grip, but minus the shutter squeal problem.
There is probably a reason for that similarity. In the late 70’s and early 80’s, Canon was just just killing it in the consumer SLR market. It started with their AE-1, which was massive, sold just zillions of units, and drank everyone’s milkshake. They followed that up with the A-1, then the AE-1P, and left Nikon in the dust. Olympus and Minolta weren’t far behind. Nikon’s answer was the FA, which wasn’t much different, looks-wise, to their previous cameras, but it was compact, affordable, and technologically-superior to their rivals at Canon. It won awards, it sold a lot of units, then a few short years into their position at the top Minolta unveiled the first camera with automatic focus and automatic film advance, the Maxam 7000, and that was all she wrote. Consumers were now all kinds of crazy about automatic cameras, and manual focus cameras lost their place at the top.
Like I mentioned, I have four Nikon AF cameras presently, and only this one manual Nikon. I don’t feel the need to add any more such cameras to my collection, though I suspect one day a friend will offer me one they are getting rid of, and I suspect I will probably take it. Nikons are great cameras, this FA is no exception. It isn’t one of my go-to cameras on the shelf, and truth be told I don’t use it that often, but that is only because I have some cameras that I love love love shooting, and I neglect all others. Maybe I’ll take this one for a walk this weekend.
