Mechanical heart, timeless vision: life with the F3

Photographer and writer David Corfield reflects on his trusted Nikon F3, a camera that became companion, tool and witness. He explores craft, patience and the tactile pleasures of film, revealing how an old tool shaped his creative life and enduring vision…

It began, as many love affairs do, with a gift.

This Nikon F3 came to me not from a shop shelf or an online auction, but from the worn, steady hands of a friend who had already lived a lifetime with it. He had been a press photographer for decades, the kind who once smelled faintly of fixer, cigarettes and strong coffee, who spoke in stories framed by deadlines and sirens. When he passed the camera to me, it wasn’t just a piece of machinery – it was an inheritance of moments.

“This one’s seen a bit,” he said with a half-smile.

Seen a bit. That was an understatement. The black paint was brassed at the edges, worn to a soft metallic sheen where his fingers had gripped it thousands of times. The leatherette bore the faint scars of hard pavements and hurried exits from car seats. The shutter release was polished smooth. It had doorstepped celebrities, waited in the rain outside courthouses, raised above jostling crowds to capture faces that would lead the evening news. It had worked football matches under floodlights and horizontal rain, its viewfinder spattered with droplets as my friend tracked strikers through mud and chaos. And now it was mine.

I remember the first time I held it alone. There was a weight to it. Not just physical, though at nearly 800 grams without a lens it certainly made its presence known. But emotional. This wasn’t a delicate, precious thing. It was a tool. Solid, unapologetically mechanical. The shutter sound was authoritative, a metallic snick that felt decisive. In an age increasingly dominated by silent digital bursts, that single, crisp act of exposure felt almost ceremonial.

The Nikon F3 was introduced in 1980, but it doesn’t feel like it belongs to a particular year. It feels timeless. Designed with input from famed car designer Giorgetto Giugiaro, it has that subtle red stripe near the grip – an understated flourish on an otherwise utilitarian body. It was Nikon’s professional flagship for over two decades, a testament to its reliability and design. But statistics and history weren’t what drew me in. It was the fact that this particular F3 had already lived a life. And a hard one at that.

My friend told me about capturing fleeting images of Princess Diana. The surge of photographers as she emerged from a hospital, the choreography of elbows and shouted questions, the split-second calculations of exposure as she stepped from shadow into flashbulb glare. He described covering cup finals, the tension in the stadium air, the rain turning to silver streaks under floodlights. Film choice mattered. Timing mattered. There were no second chances, no chimping at the back screen. When the whistle blew and the striker struck, you either had it or you didn’t.

This camera had been there for all of it, the motor drive whirring as it advanced frame after frame of Tri-X or HP5. It had endured knocks, damp boots, and the occasional angry shout from a security guard. It had been slung over shoulders in news vans, slept in kit bags, and woken at ungodly hours for early call times.

When I loaded my first roll into it, I felt a strange sense of responsibility. I wasn’t covering royalty or professional football. My subjects were quieter: the curve of a shoreline, the skeletal branches of winter trees, the low drift of mist across Scottish fields. Yet I felt the same seriousness in the act. The F3 doesn’t allow for casual shooting. Every frame costs something. Every click a commitment.

Scotland, where I live, is a generous but demanding muse. The light changes with theatrical unpredictability. One moment the hills are swallowed by cloud, the next they blaze with a fleeting shaft of gold. With the F3, I had to slow down. I metered carefully, sometimes with the built-in centre-weighted meter, sometimes trusting my instincts and experience. I began to understand light more intimately – not as something that could be endlessly corrected later, but as something to be respected in the moment.

There’s a tactile poetry to using the old stager, too. The firm click of the aperture ring. The damped smoothness of the focus helicoid on an old manual lens. The decisive snap of the shutter. Even the act of rewinding film – cranking the small lever and feeling the tension release at the end of the roll feels like closing a chapter.

In a digital workflow, images appear instantly, bright and eager on a screen. With the F3, there is a delay. A delicious, nerve-wracking delay. I drop off the film or develop it myself, and only then do I discover what I have. Sometimes I’m surprised by a frame I barely remember taking. Sometimes I’m humbled by a missed focus or a poorly judged exposure.

But always, I’m reminded that photography is not just about results; it’s about attention.

Using the F3 has given it – and me – a new lease of life. It no longer smells of newsroom ink and damp terraces, but of peat bogs and sea air. It has rested on lichen-covered rocks and been buffeted by Highland winds. The same weather sealing that protected it from rain-soaked football matches now shields it from Atlantic squalls. The same rugged build that survived scrums of paparazzi now endures long hikes in a rucksack.

There is something profoundly satisfying about that continuity. This camera was built for professionals who couldn’t afford failure. It was designed to function in chaos. And here it is, decades later, still working flawlessly as I document the quiet drama of everyday life.

The F3 has taught me patience. With only 36 exposures on a roll, I no longer fire indiscriminately. I watch more. I anticipate. I ask myself whether the scene truly deserves a frame. That discipline has improved my photography across all formats. It has sharpened my eye and slowed my pulse.

It has also connected me to my friend in a quiet, ongoing conversation. Every time I sling the F3 over my shoulder, I think of him using it under duress, rain dripping from his nose as he tracked his subjects. The camera carries those echoes.

When I show him prints from my latest roll he studies them with the same critical gaze he once applied to contact sheets under newsroom lights. Then he nods. Not effusive, just approving. The camera, I think, approves too.

In an era of relentless upgrades and disposable tech, the Nikon F3 stands as a quiet rebuke. It does not demand firmware updates. It does not beep or blink. It simply works. It asks only that you load film, set your exposure, and pay attention.

Cameras are, at heart, light-tight boxes. But sometimes they are more than that. Sometimes they are vessels of memory, continuity, and craft. My Nikon F3 is all of those things. A veteran of rainstorms and red carpets, now reborn among the hills around me.

Words and images © David Corfield