Photography Used to be Harder to Learn. Nikon tried to make it clearer.

Photography in the days of film was tougher to learn in many ways but simpler in others. It was harder because the feedback loop was so slow: take a roll of film, get it developed (or develop it yourself), then look at the photos to see what worked and what didn't. It is easy to forget nowadays, with easy access to EXIF files full of data on exposure, date, time, camera, lens, white balance, flash use, focus points utilized, GPS coordinates, etc., that this evaluation was made much more difficult by the imperfect information you had on the photos. Why was this photo so dark? Did you trust the light meter and it was wrong? Or did you set the wrong film speed? It was very possible to take a whole roll of film with the wrong film speed set, the exposure compensation set to something other than zero, the pressure plate at the wrong setting or, when it came time to develop, using the wrong chemistry. I've done all but the chemistry one myself, and I know a guy who did that. The challenge in film photography was thus the slow feedback loop and the imprecise recollection of what you did making it hard to recall what worked well and what didn't.

When Single Lens Reflex cameras began to make inroads into consumer markets in the early 1980s, Nikon realized that there were a lot of new users coming to the cameras for their flexibility and quality but who were confused about what the controls did and why they'd choose one setting over another. In 1982, they published a 54-page guide called "The Nikon Guide to 35mm SLR Cameras". They republished this in 2000 in an 80-page version updated to show the most current cameras. I have scanned these booklets into PDFs and they are linked to below.

Mamiya 7 Brochure (1995) Text about Mamiya 7.

Mamiya 7 II Brochure (1999?) Write about the Mamiya 7 II

Page last updated 4/7/2016