Friction Pt. III: Full Metal Nikon
Updated: Oct 12
By accepted gospel of product management, my experience in Part II of this trilogy should have warded me off analogue photography and the search for friction forever. I should have retreated into contactless, algorithmic comfort.
Instead, I went out looking for more. A root around Paramount Books, a second-hand book shop near Shudehill station, led me to a copy of Life magazine, 22nd October 1962. The shop doesn’t take credit cards, so more friction occurred as I rooted round my wallet for a tenner. ‘Man buys thing in cash shocker' is the UX equivalent of the feeding of the five thousand. And yet here we were.
Life is famous for its photojournalism, and the 60s were full of great examples. The photos, writing, graphic design, even the cigarette ads, are works of art. And it’s late 1962; the original reader of this was in a world where the Beatles had only released ‘Love Me Do’ two weeks previously in the UK. The defining phenomenon of the 60s was just around the corner. Kennedy was still president, man hadn’t landed on the moon.
So after a leaf through of this artefact that may as well have been from another planet, I decide on a whim that I need to run another field test. I was going to see what it was like to take those pictures, just as it would have been in ‘62.
Quick detour to a second-hand camera store. A 1961 serial number Nikon F is on the shelf. These cameras are built like tanks. Don McCullin used one in Vietnam; in Cambodia, it deflected a sniper’s bullet that might otherwise have killed him. This example has the ‘Nippon Kogaku’ logo etched in the top plate, and the original 50mm f/1.4 lens attached. I know I need to buy a couple of new tyres for the car, but this is too perfect, so I buy it instead. I buy a new roll of trusty Ilford HP5, and also a roll of Kodak Tri-X, just like the old Life journos would have used.
I go to an old, quiet pub with peeling paint to survey the goods. First a flick through Life where I see pictures of Soviet Kosmonauts, the Pope, and an endangered porpoise. The differential in quality between this magazine and just about anything we’re served on the internet is vast. That shouldn’t be the case if you think about it rationally - we’re 60 years along and should be producing higher quality goods faster and cheaper, yet we’ve regressed in areas like this. So it goes.
Just as I’m reaching the back of the magazine, admiring an ad printed in four-colour ink for IWC watches, a figure walks in the back door of the bar from Tib Street. Some woman who looks worse for wear. Ghosts through the bar, and before reaching the front door says ‘you’ve reopened then’ to the barman without a glance. Statement rather than question. Then out onto Oldham street, the apparition disappears.
A couple of days later I’m loading the HP5 roll. More sympathetic than the Tri-X, better suited to a first outing with a new camera. The process is like dismantling a rifle in the field then loading it out. Unlock the back plate, slide it off, push the roll in. Pull the leader out, drag it over the titanium foil shutter, trap the end into the opposite spool. Clip the backplate on, unhinge the winding lever, tighten the film back just enough that there’s no slack. But don’t pop it out the spool. Otherwise you’ll take 36 shots of nothing.
Out round the city to shoot. The F is a heavy camera, all brass, steel and thick glass. It’s like having an M16 slung over your shoulder. The advance lever like cocking a firing pin; the shutter release and mirror slap are like pulling the trigger and feeling the thump of recoil.
It’s totally manual too, no electronics at all. You focus manually, set your exposure manually, and cock the advance for the next shot manually. HP5 is film with latitude, but even so, you can’t under-expose too much or the frame is wasted. As I line up commuters in the viewfinder, trudging towards Piccadilly with their laptops, I like the meta absurdity. I’m using a camera from 1961 that’s still functional, barely scratched, and once survived a scrape with an AK47. As I advance the film and prepare to release the shutter, I’m aiming at people with Japanese glass over 60 years old. They’ve been shuffling PowerPoint decks all day using plastic objects that will be obsolete in a couple of years.
Two days later I drop off the film for development. It’s a Saturday afternoon in 2026 and there’s a queue out the door for a film lab. None of this makes sense. We’re all carrying phones with cameras in them, ready to share pictures to the internet without friction, yet here we are.
On the way out the lab I head back to Paramount and scour the magazines again, fifteen quid in my wallet in anticipation. No Life issues, but there is Paris Match, or an old Italian publication called Epoca. I still speak a bit of Italian so decide there’s more chance I can read it and so buy the copy. It’s from 1960, just after the Rome Olympics where Muhammad Ali won gold. He’s not in this edition though, he was just an amateur fighter from Kentucky back then after all. Instead, Epoca is full of photos of Italian track cyclists and noir film stars. The quality throughout is comparable, if not better, than Life.
Tuesday morning, I get the images back. Not bad for a first shoot - full of grain, graduated greys, detailed highlights. A couple of underexposures but I’ll save them through an edit of the digital versions. That’s not cheating either - the original Life darkroom team would have been dodging and burning round the clock in the 60s, under pressure to get the highest quality edition possible out on time. Quick tweak of the black/white levels and contrast in Affinity, and the images are saved.
At the end of all this, we learn a couple of things. That the rules of UX and Product aren’t immutable. They weren’t delivered on a stone tablet. You’re allowed to go against them, and nothing bad will happen. In fact if you apply them in the right place, you’ll create an experience and a product that users will bond with. We learn that the product ethos of the early 1960s produced items that are still visually impressive and functionally usable six decades later. No smartphone is going to stop a bullet.
We also learn that it’s £16 a roll to develop 36 exposures, and you have to wait ten minutes in a queue. That’s bad friction, the stuff we needed an alternative to, which digital delivered. The same way we can’t be dogmatic about the eradication of friction, we can’t be dogmatic about the existence of it.
Nuance and intent are what really matter. Rather than be zero-sum and take a clickbait position on things, it’s better to accept that two things can exist at once with their own merits. All you have to do is recognise when to apply each.
Not easy if you’re in a big corporation with pressure to report every quarter. That’s the world of de-risking, of conformance, of narratives to assure institutional shareholders that all is under control and targets will be achieved. I think it was me who said that ‘if you have a pension, you have a vested interest in that happening’. Analysts won’t upgrade targets because some pasty northern hipster spent an afternoon pretending a camera was a rifle.
But if you’re in the business of luxury or performance products then you get where I’m coming from. They need to be viewed in 2086 the way I eulogise over those copies of Life and Epoca. You can’t really do that digitally either. The silicon will be long obsolete, the libraries deprecated. You have to find your version of the advance lever and mirror slap. You have to create words and pictures that have the technicians running round all night before going to press. Then merge it with digital so no-one has to wait fifteen minutes to drop a roll of film off and pay for the pleasure.
Read the preceding articles in the trilogy here: Friction Pt. I and Friction Pt.II
David Turner is the founder of Kói, an independent technology consultancy advising investors, founders, and boards on product strategy and technology assessment.
You can reach him at: enquiries@dkoi.design
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