Just a Simple Picture: A One Shot Story

On a recent evening walk along the East River waterfront, I spotted a colorful group of sea kayakers beating their way back upstream from an outing in New York Harbor. I had a Nikon FE with me, acquired recently with a fast prime lens for about $240, loaded with Fujicolor 400. Although wishing that I’d also packed the excellent Nikkor H 85mm f1.8 telephoto ($145 more), I made do with the wider perspective of the 50mm f/1.4, firing off a number of frames as the group passed by. As the line of kayaks stretched in front of the towers of lower Manhattan, gilded by the sunset, I felt grateful for the camera and for the comfort of the FE’s aperture-priority autoexposure.

As regular readers of this forum will know, I’ve spent much of the current year shooting black and white film in medium and large format cameras, toiling in the darkroom to wrestle just the right palette of grays from the negatives they produced. Compared to those effortful prints, making this photograph was simplicity itself: almost sinful in its ease.

At the very least, this picture reminds me to not always take things so seriously: to shoot color film in addition to black and white; to allow a pro lab to develop and scan the negatives from time to time; to make room for the simple and the pretty. As for the FE—a camera I’ve been using recently with a growing set of vintage lenses—I look forward to making it part of my regular rotation as summer winds down, perhaps returning here for a fuller review in the future.

Thanks for having a look.

FEATURED IMAGE: Kayaks on the East River, August 2026. Nikon FE, Nikkor 50 mm f/1.4, Fujicolor 400 rated at 200, professionally developed and scanned at Photo Life, Brooklyn.

You can see more of my photos at leica1933.com

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