Nikon F100 film SLR review

A review of the Nikon F100 film SLR for professional wedding and portrait photography.

The most useful 35mm film SLR ever made?

The Nikon F100 is the most useful 35mm film SLR ever made. In my view being the most useful, also makes it the best. There I've said it, its out there, in the open. Judge me if you wish but as far as I can see it is simply a fact. I use mine for wedding photography.

Nikon F5

All the functionality of the F5 that you will actually use, without the additional F5 functionality you would never actually use in-the-field. Yes the F5 has a colour meter but the meter on the F100 is already extremely good. The F100 weighs about half a tonne less than the F5 and is a fraction of the price enabling you to own several (I have two).

Nikon F6

On paper the F6 is the best 35mm film SLR the world has ever seen and I suspect this, at least in part, is why Nikon developed it. Nikon knew the age of film SLRs was essentially at an end, that no one was going to develop new film SLRs and they wanted to be able to dangle the undisputed worlds best 35mm film SLR in front of Canon's nose forever. But what should the worlds best film SLR be like?

The answer was surprisingly simple, no new technological advances were required. All Nikon had to do was put their latest 1005 pixel metering system found in their new digital SLRs into the worlds best 35mm film body, no not the big heavy F5, the Nikon F100.

The F6 is an F100 with a D2 metering system built to F5 durability. Yes I know this is not technically true, if you want a complete picture go and find a spec sheet, but for many practical applications this summary is close to the mark.

That's what it looks like on paper, but there is a catch, and the catch is called real life.

The Nikon F100's 10 segment exposure meter - the perfect metering pattern for wedding photography?

Many might disagree with me, I can only speak from my own experience and my experience as a wedding photographer is simply this: The Nikon F100 gives the most reliable real life exposure in all the varied lighting situations that is wedding photography.

Exposure compensation +0.5 for wedding photography and outside portraits

My F100's are permanently set to over-expose by half a stop. Every photograph I shoot at a wedding with a Nikon F100 is "overexposed" by half a stop unless I am on manual and using a hand held light meter. Of course they aren't really overexposed because exposure is itself a subjective thing, film ISO ratings are a recommendation by the manufacturer but they know there is latitude in how the film can be used. Camera manufacturers also have different ideas about how to translate the metering information into an aexposure value.

The 10 segment meter of the F100, "overexposured" by half a stop gives me a great print every time, bright vibrant colours every time which clients love. No special printing is required, none of the "work-flow" issues which blight digital photography, just great pictures every time.

The Nikon F100 is the master of real life outdoor TTL metering.

The 1005 pixel sensors of my various Nikon Digital SLRs don't do this and the reason seems quite simple to me. The 1005 pixel meter tries too hard. It finds the brightest 1/1005th of the image and the darkest 1/1005th of the image and tries too hard to accomodate both. I'm not suggesting it simply finds the mid point, clearly it does not but it still tries to hard too accomodate irrelevent detail. Because each segment of the 10 segment meter of the F100 essentially takes an average of a fairly large part of the sky (roughly 1/10th, 100 times larger than each pixel of the 1005 pixel sensor) the camera isn't overly concerned by tiny areas which are extremely bright or dark. If there is a small part of the sky which is very bright, the F100 effectively ignores it because it is unaware of it.

Yes this means that part of the sky is blown, but so what, as a wedding photographer you don't care about blown sky if it means that as a result of the greater exposure you can see detail in the grooms dark suit. All to often with the 1005 pixel meter you get great sky detail forcing you to spend time in Photoshop recovering detail in the grooms suit. This is so annoying and time consuming I use centre weighted metering pretty much all the time when shooting digital even with my D700 just to make sure faces are properly exposed. This is effectively a step backwards from the 10 segment meter of the F100. What on earth are Nikon thinking! Above all else you must get peoples faces correctly exposed. The F100 correctly exposes faces, well if you set the exposure compensation for +0.5 it does. The 1005 pixel meter doesn't, not every time like the F100. And every time matters when you are taking hundreds of photos per assignment.

Retro metering patterns

So please, Nikon if you ever read this, I want a digital SLR with all your latest metering ideas but I also want some "retro metering patterns", in particular I want a metering mode which groups those 1005 pixels into the 10 segments of the F100. Do that, and for wedding photography and much other outdoor photography you have a winner. As we all know it isn't how many pixels or segments you have that is important, it is what you do with them, and the Nikon F100 has it spot on for wedding photography. The F100 always underexposes by half a stop but it is consistently under by half a stop. I can live with that.

Autofocus and autofocus selection

The autofocus can hunt around a bit but it generally gets there in time to capture wedding action shots. It isn't quiet but then it also isn't intrusive. If you want noisey autofocus get a Nikon F801s.

The F100 has five autofocus positions arranged from top to bottom row 1:3:1. Each is selectable using the thumb rocker switch on the back. This works really well, selection is very fast. I find this very important. I suspect 1:3:1 isn't actually quite enough for rapid reportage style wedding photography, and 3:5:3 is better. Actually 3:5:3 is probably optimum. More recent cameras may offer 50 plus autofocus positions. This is clearly silly and is actually a disadvange because it slows you down. Much better to have a few which are fast to select. For natural unobtrusive wedding photography speed is the key to capture the action as it happens.

You might think this is a lame point, all cameras do focus selection well these days but you would be wrong. You see I have a Canon 5D digital SLR which has a "joystick" type autofocus selector switch on the back. The 5D is about a decade newer than the F100 but Canon made a real pigs ear of it, autofocus selection is shockingly bad. The joystick is difficult to use quickly with precision, in fact this sums up the whole camera which can best be described as slow and clumsy compared to any professional Nikon more recent than the Nikon F801s (which only has a single autofocus position in the centre). I purchased the 5D solely for its low noise at ISO 1600 when Nikon had nothing to match it for low ambient lighting. This is before the Nikon D3.

Speed of operation and the right buttons

The longer I do professional wedding photography, the more I appreciate a camera which is fast to use. Autofocus point selection speed is probably the most important to me but there are other features I need too.

Exposure mode selection is trival with the mode switch on the top right and the rotation of the command dial. As a general rule I use shutter priority outside, aperture priority inside and manual as and when I need to and with portable studio lights. I never use the program mode.

The top left of the F100 has three buttons: exposure bracketing, flash sync mode and film speed. The latter isn't too important since I might shoot an entire wedding at ISO 400, for example Fuji NPH at its rated speed, without pushing or pulling the film. Neither is exposure bracketing. I use this extensively for landscape photography for my own amusement with Ilford Delta 100 or 400 but rarely at a wedding, to be honest it is just too expensive to bracket too many shots.

Flash exposure compensation

I use flash exposure compensation extensively for weddings, typically -2 stops in bright sunlight, or -3 stops in cloudy weather. The F100 does this with great flair but you can't set it on the camera, it must be set on the flash gun. It is still TTL. Clearly how easy (and therefore how fast under pressure) it is to do this will depend greatly on the flash gun. Typically I use a Metz 54MZ4 on this camera, despite having several SB-800's. Once you are in the habit of doing it on this Metz gun it is just as quick as using a dedicated flash compensation button on more recent cameras like the D700. Of course other flash guns might not be so fast to adjust this way.

Overall I find the Nikon F100 very fast to use for wedding photography and perfectly fine for portrait photography where speed is much less of an issue.