Wallace Koopmans Artlog

After years of problem free photography with various Olympus Stylus Epics a string of photographic bad luck befell me. Specifically I had two Stylus Epics exhibit light leaks and this at a time when I wanted a good one for an upcoming trip. Luckily I had a champagne coloured Epic DLX so I quickly ran a roll of film through it and had it developed at the local drug store. Well I seem to have gotten lucky because all the images turned out leak free. The final proof though will be when I develop the film that I shot through it in Paris and London.

Everything in the world of film happens at a little bit of a slower pace and so this is my response to the release of the Nikon D5 DSLR.  Twenty years ago in 1996 the F5 was the state of the art in SLR’s and I imagine that the D5 is intended to hold the same place within modern DSLR’s. Both were released to coincide with Summer Olympics.  There are many technological elements from the F5 that a photographer would find are familiar today.

I thought it would be fun to do a little comparison of the features of each camera that can be matched up.

Beyond these it can get a little silly to continue the comparison as so many of the advancements are related to digital capture.  The most obvious being the fact that the D5 shoots video.

The point of even starting the comparison though is to illustrate just how advanced the F5 was as a film camera and if you compare it against its first Digital camera competitors it holds up even better.

One thing about one camera: While you can rewind the film in a Nikon F5 by hand with the little crank it offered a power rewind through a sequence of procedures that feels more like the opening of a secret passage way leading to treasure.  First open the cryptic film rewind cover then press the mystical  button hidden within.  Next turn the mysterious film rewind lever counter clockwise while pressing the secret lock release.  Then and only then will the treasure be reveled or the film will rewind in a matter of seconds.