This is not the Nikon FE I bought about twenty to twenty-five years ago. I sold that and then a few years later I had a yen to have one again, so I bought this one.
It’s a manual focus camera that uses one little Mallory cell to power the exposure meter, and the battery lasts about a year of normal shooting. To take a reading you half cock the wind-on lever and that activates the meter. Then you adjust either the aperture on the lens or the shutter speed on the dial on the top plate until the needle and your settings coincide.
As long as you remain in similar lighting conditions you can leave that where it is once you have set it. If the lighting changes you have to reset the exposure.
After a while you get into the habit of keeping an eye on that floating needle in the viewfinder.
And for years I have used it in the same way to get the correct exposure, namely to line up the floating needle in the left of the viewfinder to the control needle by changing aperture or shutter speed. And I never gave a thought to the word ‘Auto’ on the shutter speed dial.
At least I didn’t until I was watching a video about the Nikon F3, and the presenter explained its development from the Nikon F2. In the course of doing that he mentioned that the Nikon FE could operate in Aperture Priority with auto exposure by setting the shutter speed dial to Auto.
What a revelation, because my reason for leaving the camera on the shelf is that having to do two things – focus the manual focus lens and also to get the exposure right – is one too many things to do when I want to take a shot when the scene is changing rapidly.
The lens on the camera is a Nikon 50mm f1.8 E lens, known for rendering a dreamy or filmic image character.
Maybe the 50mm f1.4 AIS, known for making very rounded images with depth. That thought can park itself until I use the camera and see what I think of the result with the current lens.
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