As part of an ongoing project to shoot a film with a different vintage camera every month, March 2025 was the turn of a Nikon FM2 35mm SLR, loaded with Kodak TX400 (TriX) black-and-white film.
I’ve always been on the Canon side of the Nikon-Canon “rivalry”, so I joked that shooting Nikon this month represented me going over to the “dark side”. But it’s a nice looking camera, and it appeared to be in full working order, so having shot Olympus in January and February it felt like time for a change.
I don’t have a great selection of Nikon-mount lenses – in fact I think I only have the one – so this month every shot was taken with the 50mm f/1.4 lens that came with this camera when I first acquired it, in with a job lot from a local photographer that was looking for good new homes for a bunch of old equipment. Most of it got sold straight away with proceeds to charity, but the Nikon went into my collection.
Initial impressions were that the camera feels nicely balanced, viewfinder is clear, focusing is easy and precise, and the “manual with over/under indication in viewfinder” metering is easy to use. The focus (and the lens mount) rotate the the other way to what I am used to, but that didn’t really cause me any problems, just the occasional moment of confusion.
So, how did the photos turn out? Exposure-wise, there were just a couple that went wrong, almost certainly user error, probably forgetting to check! Focus was usually good enough (though focussing accurately-enough to use wider apertures successfully was a challenge). I didn’t really lose any shots to camera shake, and there were no obvious light leaks. I did lose one shot at the start because I had not advanced the film far enough after loading, and there was one day in the middle where I thought I had taken a photo but had not. The usual problem of struggling to find subjects and settling for uninteresting shots of uninteresting subjects, just to make sure I got my “Film photo of the day” each day was made slightly easier by having 400ASA film loaded and a fast lens, and thus being able to shoot indoors rather than being restricted to outside daylight use.
Overall, I enjoyed the camera, and I’m very happy with the film. I did have some issues developing it as I struggled to get it to load properly into the Agfa Rondinax daylight development tank I usually use, and ended up having to unwind everything in a changing bag and use a traditional Patterson tank (well, a Jessops clone) instead. I suspect I may use the Jessops tank in future as it’s really no harder than the Rondinax, and doesn’t leak developer.
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