It was a bit like what (I suppose) it might feel like to drive a classic sports car: other drivers would give it a second glance. For drivers read photographers. It's a very stylish Camera. An icon. But I need to be hard headed, and it's just not up to the job. Long story short, when I bought it back in 2011 or thereabouts, I learned that the meter would have to be tweaked to function with modern batteries. It was sent away to Liverpool for that and a CLA. It came back with dust on the mirror which hadn't been there before, and (as I've eventually worked out) a meter leading to underexposure of about two stops.

It's all come to light in 2018, because it sat unused for several years, so I can hardly kick up a fuss with the technicians in Liverpool now. I don't even know if they're still in business. No one else is, apparently: camera repairers in Edinburgh and Glasgow didn't respond to my inquiries. I read somewhere you can send any Nikon back to the mothership in Japan for repair. I never followed that up, but would imagine with the postage and everything, there'd not be much change out of £100.

Or I could have a go myself, it doesn't look too mind-bogglingly difficult. But I'd have to buy tools, and a soldering iron, so I'd still be shelling out £50 or more for that, and whilst I do like fiddling around with old cameras, (it's incredibly relaxing), I can't see myself doing enought of it to justify investment in tools. And I wondered, if I got it all opened up, what if I found the diode to adjust the current had indeed been fitted by the Liverpool lads, then it would be a highly technical question: why had that not worked?

So then I thought, ok, I'll just get the eye-level prism for it, make it look even more stylish, a la Don McCullin in Vietnam. But it wouldn't have a meter, which would be ok about 75% of the time, but I'd miss 25% of my photos. Or (and clutching at straws now) I could just use it with flash, and the metering wouldn't matter. Silly sod, I really need to work with daylight a lot of the time.  And the eye level finder comes out at about £80 or more.

The bottom line is, even if I do find a technician I can trust (which I haven't) we're probably talking in excess of £100 to get it fixed. There are a lot of Fs on ebay for not much more than that, so I might as well have bought another one, but I don't want to go through all of this hassle, again, with the bloomin' meter.

The answer appears to be a Nikon F4s, which I can get for a couple of hundred quid or less. Flog the F, of course, and I'll probably take a hit on that because of the meter, but it's a question of cutting my losses and getting on with taking the photos I want to take. The F4s is ideal for that. In fact it looks like a brilliant camera.

The thing is with cross processing, do it with a pro camera, rather than fingers crossed. 25 years ago, a professional would have paid the equivalent of several thousand pounds for an F4, and I can get it for a tenth of that today.

Voila.