The Nikon F3

In Dublin

Only a particular kind of madness leads a grown man to fly to Dublin in late October carrying a camera designed in 1980, when the phone in his pocket could photograph the surface of Mars and order a pizza while doing it. But the Nikon F3 is a thing of beauty, all Giugiaro curves and that jaunty little red stripe, and it makes a click so satisfying you want to buy it a drink. Which, in Dublin, is never a difficult proposition. The wind off the Liffey that weekend was the sort that doesn't so much blow as rearrange you, and I spent much of Saturday morning walking sideways down Dame Street like a crab with somewhere to be, clutching the F3 to my chest as if it were a premature infant. I ducked into Conns Cameras on Clarendon Street partly for film and partly for shelter. There I was received by a man who looked at my camera the way a sommelier looks at a decent Burgundy, which is to say with approval tempered by the suspicion I didn't deserve it. I left with four rolls of HP5 and the warm glow of having been judged and found barely adequate.

Trinity College was next, because you are legally obliged to visit, and also because its cobbles are photogenic in a way that does serious damage to your ankles. I spent forty minutes trying to frame the Campanile while gangs of Spanish students wandered into shot with the uncanny timing of people who have been paid to do it. The F3's meter, a tiny LCD readout apparently designed by someone who had never encountered an Irish afternoon, gave up somewhere around four o'clock. I carried on regardless, guessing exposures with the reckless confidence of a man who would not see the results for a fortnight and so could not yet be proven wrong. Then I crossed the Ha'penny Bridge to The Winding Stair, a bookshop so perfectly what a bookshop should be, all creaking floors and leaning shelves and a window full of grey river, that I bought three books I didn't need. Upstairs I ate something involving smoked fish and felt, briefly, like a literary figure, until I spilled chowder on my scarf.

The evening belongs to the pubs, as Dublin evenings tend to. I began at Peadar Kearney's on Dame Street, named for the man who wrote the words to the Irish national anthem. That strikes me as a far better use of a national hero than a statue, since you can't order a pint from a statue. From there I drifted into Temple Bar, where a stag party from Leeds was singing something that may once have been "Galway Girl" before it was violently beaten. I took refuge in the Turk's Head on Parliament Street, an establishment decorated as though a Victorian music hall had collided with a Moroccan bazaar and nobody had bothered to tidy up. I sat in a corner with a Guinness and the F3 on the table before me, wind howling at the windows. I shot my last frame of the day at a sixtieth of a second, wide open, on the hopeful theory that the barman's shaking hand would read as atmosphere rather than incompetence. It probably won't. But that, I've come to realise, is the whole point of film. You don't find out for weeks whether you've captured something wonderful, and in the meantime you get to believe you have