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Nikon F6 – they say it is (or was) the most advanced 35mm film camera made

As a schoolboy who loved photography (this is around 1970), the Nikon F was the pinacle of cameras and at a price completely out of my (family’s) price range, between £350-£400 in 1970 prices. When they bought me my own camera, a Praktica from East Germany, it cost the sum of £49 19s. 6d from Wallace Heaton (which I think was in Bond Street).

Here it is. Not my actual camera.

But now fifty or so years later vintage Nikons are cheap – mostly. They started with the first (F – obviously) and finally gave up making film cameras with the F6. Here they all are (from https://www.reddit.com/r/AnalogCommunity/comments/1qjbyux/nikon_lineup_f_through_f6/):

I bought an F4 body from Japan about a year ago. I think it takes very good photographs and I found the autofocus good and the exposure meter also pretty fool proof. But after a while and particularly when I wanted to take this camera travelling I found its weight annoying. Also, almost every dial and button has a locking device on it that means you have to press a little button while changing the setting or whatever else you are trying to accomplish. You’d have to call the camera clunky though very effective.

Most of the Fs are relatively cheap now – the F4 was less than £200 – apart from the final F6. This now sells for around £1200 – £1800. Obviously it is the most modern and much of the design is identical to early digital Nikons. On an impulse I bought one – again from Japan and paid about £300 in taxes above the £1300. It is beautiful, especially compared with the heavy-duty F4.

It sits very comfortably in the hand, unlike the F4. The information displayed in the viewfinder is modern, unlike the rather spidery numbers in the F4. It even saves shooting data meaning you don’t have to carry a notebook if you want to remember which settings worked well – but you either have to squint at the info on a small LCD screen on the back of the camera or try to find a vintage proprietary card reader that downloads that info onto a memory card. These cost between £200 to £500!

I’ve yet to develop any pictures I have taken with it.

When paired with the 50mm f1.4 Nikkor AF-D, it is a reasonably compact prospect.

Navigating with Garmin Zumo XT and MyRouteApp on Aoocci CarPlay unit

A free day with sunshine and I decided to revisit an old haunt, the Adventure Bike Shop down in Suffolk near the classic English small town, Long Melford. I saw, a while back, that they have stopped selling clothing and have some discounts to clear their stock. Baselayers that I bought many years ago are in bad need of being thrown out and replaced by something with a bit of life (and stretch) in them so this was in my mind. Over the years I have spent thousands with the Adventure Bike Shop, on a helmet or two and Klim clothing.

The shop has a lot of Touratech stock, all kinds of items large and fiddly-small in little packets. And it still had what looked like a pretty full stock of Klim suits. I suppose they take a long time to sell, being a major investment for most riders. Luckily for me they had a good selection of base layers, Solstice (a name which brings out the hippy in me – more than their Aggressor range) shirt and leggings which I had never seen before and at half price. And everything fitted perfectly when I tried it on at home.

screenshot of MyRoute App route planning page

But I sat down to write about the next episode in my navigation indecisions. As a paid up subscriber to My Route App, it was time I used it – to plan a slightly more cross-country route from Cambridge to Acton (the one in Suffolk not west London) than blasting down the A14 which is very easy to do. Not so easy at all is transferring the route onto my Garmin Zumo. I ended up with one of those double routes that includes the route you want to travel along plus a dead straight line from start to finish. So I made this journey with the Zumo’s version of the 36 mile route in front of me as well as My Route App running on my Aoocci CarPlay device. The Zumo showed the correct route but also the straight line option constantly telling me that I was ‘off the route’ even when I was on it. MyRouteApp on the other hand behaved perfectly and even recalculated when I missed a turn – which the Zumo was in no state to do. On the way home though, the Aoocci did not seem to find a signal via my phone until well into the journey (so was of little use) while the Zumo was able to guide me home without a problem – the advantage of a true GPS. But once I did have CarPlay running, I was able to switch to Waze briefly to get information about an unexpected jam in one of the small towns I had to pass through.

My decision then is to ride with both when I need guidance. The phone did not use very much data to take me on this 70 mile round trip so it would be doable on a European trip, perhpas with a local SIM.

Staying on the land

Compared to some recent trips to faraway places, there is not that much to say about this short trip to stay in Suffolk. A few things were interesting:

A ride over to Dunwich and Walberswick to swim in the sea. It was not a hot day – in fact it was raining when I first arrived – but the sea temperature was fine and it was also fine to leave my large pile of motorcycle clothes on the stoney beach while I took a dip.

I bought a drone a few weeks before the trip to start to record any building work on the land from the air and to plan, and also record, progress – eventually – on digging and making a natural swimming pond. Here’s where it should go. It will be about 12 metres long.

Also on the topic of swimming, I made a point of revisiting the scene of my sudden realisation a few years back that I couldn’t swim. Beccles Lido. I rode over there and used their single dedicated parking spot for a motorcycle. I swam up and down with many others for half an hour or so and did not panic once – as I did all those years ago.

Here’s the drone: a DJI Mini 4 Pro – or some other combination of words. I’m happy with it but so far a useless and jerky flyer, I mean pilot. There is something breath-taking about that arial perspective. Its something about that human dream to be able to fly – like we do in dreams.

Tesco in Diss as usual provided my sustenance and drink. My method was to buy a bag of ice with each visit and rig up a hanging, temporary (until all the ice melts in a puddle on the floor) fridge to keep my meat, fish and white wine cold. I discovered some very nice new gin that came in a metal bottle.

For a complicated reason I am storing a futon mattress in the barn and have discovered that it provides a much more comfortable night’s sleep than a sleeping mat in my narrow tent.

Finally, here’s my bike making an appearance.

1975 and its contents

1975 was a formative year for me. It was, partly, the year between leaving school and starting university. I was 18 and 19 during it. For a few months, I can’t remember exactly how many, I worked as an assistant warden in a youth hostel in Dorset. I was attracted to the area by having read a number of Thomas Hardy novels and wrote to the YHA, for some reason, asking if they had jobs in that part of the country. These posts were unpaid but you got full board and lodging. In my case this meant sharing a room with the warden, and sleeping on a sofa. It was, how shall I put it, an eye-opening few months. The warden was, I would guess, in his 40s. Everybody looked old to a 19 year old. One of his ‘hobbies’ was riding a motorcycle and a number of his men friends would visit and they all also rode motorcycles. The most interesting visitor was Ted. Not Ted Simon but Ted (Edward) Goring. Ted lived in Bath, worked as a journalist there and rode a very snazzy new motorbike. It had electric start which the warden and his friends, who role British bikes that sometimes started after a frenzy of kicking, used to make fun of. It was a BMW and I am pretty sure it was a R90/s. Now that I am developing an interest in restoring a classic BMW, am am taking more notice of these old models. I even ran a search on the DVLA website to see if I could locate this bike. I knew the registration number because the photos taken at the time – of me sitting or standing next to it – clearly show it. It looks like it hasn’t been used for about 25 years.

I think Ted must have been its first owner and he must have visited us down in Dorset soon after buying it, to try it out and show it off perhaps. I remember, through a rather golden mist of nostalgia, the Sunday evening when he gave me a ride from Dorset to Bath for me to stay with him on my day off. It was that ride, stored in my memory, that influenced my decision to take the bike test and buy a motorcycle back in 2008.

I also remember that not many months afterwards, Ted had a bad accident. I believe that a mobile crane or some other large vehicle backed into him when he was stationery and he broke a leg. I have a memory that he discharged himself from an NHS hospital because he thought that they were not treating it properly and checked in at some private place. I also have a memory of visiting him in his Royal Crescent flat while he was struggling around, and very grumpy, on crutches. I don’t know what happened to the bike in that accident. Clearly it lived on for another 24 years at least. And perhaps it remains, gathering dust and mice, in some real or metaphorical barn waiting for me to track it down and restore and ride it.

I have often wondered what happened to Ted and finally I found an obituary. I have missed him by 4 years, sadly. Edward Goring’s obituary is here: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/aug/11/edward-goring-obituary

The text mentions his love of motorcycles which is nice. ‘He continued riding high-powered machines into his 70s’. In Bath he introduced me, fleetingly, to Jan Morris through the sunroof of her BMW.

Wales trip Day 2 Tenbury to Ludlow then Trawnsfynydd campsite

Breakfast in the Bridge Inn was in front of a huge HD television screen showing us the Olympics opening ceremony from Paris – eventually I saw they had left the remote around so I turned it down. Two other couples came down for breakfast, one an older man in a bright orange Hawaiian shirt with a younger female partner. The food had the same slightly unhealthy feel to it.

I got up to Ludlow by a surprising and pleasant back route to pay my visit to J who lives in what I think used to be called a warden-controlled flat in a block. The street is steep but I could pull in and park the bike next to the big metal gates into the carpark of her block. Jane came out but wasn’t able to open the gates with her fob so I had to manoeuvre the bike to one side, grateful that it is relatively light. I wondered if there was a fault or whether she had the wrong item. In the end someone else let me in and gain I needed to park the bike in a narrow space.

J told me that she is very happy where she is living. She asked me about my family, then again a few minutes later and then a third time. I had a gradual realisation of her mental state. We went for lunch in a cafe next door, a lovely place but we arrived an hour earlier than she had booked. Because of the noise for much of the time we each read separate sections of the newspaper which she went out to buy. With flashes of some of her earlier character, she asked me some sharp questions about a book that I had written. I shouldn’t accept passively that the publisher is rubbish at publicity, she said. After lunch we went back and chatted for a while in her flat. I asked her what her plans were for her memoire which she had sent me a few years back in order to discuss publication. She seemed utterly surprised that she had written such a thing and asked me to send her a copy. Age and chronology became a little disturbing for me. First, she informed me that she would be 84 at her next birthday, not 90 as I had thought she had told me. Then she told me that she had moved into this accommodation 16 years ago. I was shocked to do the sums that revealed that she moved there when she was the same age that I am now.

When I prepared to leave, it was clear that J couldn’t open the gate so again another resident came and opened it as she beckoned me to get through before it closed. And after a quick goodbye I was off, turning right up the hill toward the town centre.

Then the real holiday, perhaps, started with being on the bike, leaving Ludlow and heading north west towards the campsite I had booked in Trawnsfynydd. I found the time with J quite upsetting, partly to see her own mental decline from her days as a sharp-minded academic and secondly how her age and faculties might map onto my own. So the cool air and sunshine of my ride was good to clear my head a little.

Details

Tenbury to Ludlow and then to Trawnsfynydd

My camp was Camp Stesion. It is in the Snowdonia national park and has beautiful vistas that it took me quite a while to really notice and appreciate. Once I unpacked I headed off 20 minutes to a supermarket at Portmadog for provisions. The campsite has simple facilities with a nice style – shower rooms with corrugated steel walls, for example. It was quiet apart from a group – two young couples – that started playing heavy beats at 10pm, leading me to get out of my sleeping bag and go over to ask them to stop. They did but talked and laughed for most of the night. They had two large suitcases on wheels as their luggage.

Campsite in Transfynydd (approx) — Simple facilities that are just right

Thork Racing DMD T865 – its going

DMD is now de-installed. The last time I tried to use it, I decided that it had to go. The signal via the iPhone kept dropping, and once it has you need to restart tethering and then connect the phone again. So basically you have to wait till you stop to go through all that. Other bluetooth connections would also keep dropping. Occasionally the device would just shut down, and whenever I was riding with the sun behind me, shining on the screen, it was totally invisible. And voice instructions were almost inaudible at high speed or with wind noise. So everything is now disconnected, de-installed, back in its boxes and ready to be put onto eBay – once I delete my data from the tablet. My old Garmin mount is back on the bike and I am uploading the routes and POIs for my upcoming trip to north Wales. Garmin have released an XT2 and hopefully my sale of the DMD might fund that update.

The DMD seemed such a promising bit of kit. The DMD control centre – the launcher – seemed so clever, with ability to start other apps, receive alerts, monitor engine stats via OBD2 and then function as an internet device in the evening and even use the Kindle app. The screenshots look so well thought out. But for me it just didn’t deliver. Perhaps as a mainly road rider there just isn’t enough going for this device which seems mainly attractive to off-roaders. Enough said.

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