I got a Nikon camera...

One of my wife's coworkers gave us a couple of old film cameras the other day - something he'd had knocking around for decades.
One was a Mamiya C3 double-lens reflex, 2¼x2¼ camera.
The other was this - a Nikon F with the Ftn light meter finder and a 50mm f/1.45 lens.
This was once the camera of my dreams. When I got into the newspaper business back in the mid-1960s, this was the absolute ultimate supreme 35mm single lens reflex camera. All of the top shooters, especially guys covering Vietnam like Eddie Adams and David Douglas Duncan, wouldn't walk out the front door without at least two of these hanging from neck and shoulders - one with a wide-angle lens, the other with a telephoto.
These things were clunky and heavy but they earned the reputation of being able to take a terrible beating and keep on going. One shooter of the period called the Nikon F a "hockey puck" for its indestructibility and the name stuck.
For whatever reason, I didn't think I could afford a Nikon, so when I was ready to step up from a Mamiya HiMatic 7 rangefinder 35mm to an SLR, I bought a Pentax Spotmatic and ended up investing in several Pentax screw-mount lenses. They were a nightmare to change under pressure because it was tricky to get the threads lined up.
Nikon, of course, pioneered the bayonet mount - insert the lens into the camera body, give it a twist and it locks into place.
I eventually got seduced by autofocus point-and-shoots and it wasn't until I started hanging out with Maria that I sold all of my Pentax junk and started investing in Nikon gear - first an N90S, then an F5 before we transitioned to our digital D100s.
My friend Bob Basler, who went on to the Albany, N.Y. Knickerbocker News and then to Reuters, married the daughter of the president of the Associated Press. Consequently, he came to know Eddie Adams and ended up with one of Eddie's Nikon Fs.
The F, introduced in 1959, was the first successful 35mm SLR and helped change "Made in Japan" from pejorative expression to a mark of quality and precision.
By today's standards, it's as ancient and obsolete as a typewriter. Other than the light meter, there's nothing electronic about it. Everything is mechanical.
No autofocus, no program modes, no automatic film advance. You focus manually with a (to my eyes, anyway) hard to use viewfinder screen and you set the shutter speed and aperture manually. You also advance the film with a thumb lever.
The light meter, which replaced the stock prism eyepiece housing, was a through-the-lens affair, so it saw what the film would see in terms of light. You achieved a proper exposure by adjustinaperturere and shutter speed to balance a light meter needle that appeared at the top of the viewing field. Along with the needle, there was also a read-out for the shutter speed.
The meter used two 1.35 volt mercury batteries, which are no longer available because of environmental concerns about mercury. The mercury cells were ideal because they continued to deliver a consistent 1.35 volts throughout their life until they finally crapped out. Currently available 1.35 volt cells deliver less and less power as they age, which means less and less accurate meter readings. The other choice is 1.5 volt cells which deliver a consistently wrong reading by an f-stop or two.
Other than dead meter batteries, the Nikon F given to us appears to be usable. The optics are reasonably clear and the shutter seems ok. I expect I'll run a roll of film though it soon and see how it does, not that I expect to use it for anything important.
All of our serious work is digital and on the rare occasion that I do need to shoot film, I have the F's direct descendant - the Nikon F5. But the F5 has been obsoleted too, by the F6 - what many believe will be Nikon's last professional 35mm SLR.
But whether I ever use the F or not, it's fun to finally own one and to have a piece of photojournalistic history on my office bookcase shelf.