Nikon EL2

Nikon built the EL2 in 1977 to plug a hole in its own lineup. The Nikkormat EL and ELW had introduced aperture-priority automation to the F-mount world, but they predated the AI lens system. The EL2 was the fix: take that proven aperture-priority body, add automatic maximum aperture indexing so the new AI lenses would couple cleanly, and put it on shelves. Its life was short. The FE arrived in 1978, barely a year later, and quickly overshadowed it, though the EL2 lingered in the catalog into 1980. So it ended up an in-between camera, the last of the old electronic Nikons and a quiet preview of what the FE would do better and cheaper.

Pick one up and the first thing you notice is the weight. This is a heavy all-metal body from the era when Nikon assumed you would drop it and expect it to keep working. The finder is bright and big, with a center-weighted meter that Nikon got right years before. On the right side of the frame a needle swings against a shutter-speed scale, and in automatic mode it shows you the shutter speed the camera has chosen. You focus on the split-prism center, watch the needle settle, and shoot. The shutter is a vertical-travel Copal Square unit, electronically timed, running from a long four seconds out to about 1/1000, with flash sync at 1/120. The clunk it makes is honest and a little loud, nothing like the whisper of a rangefinder.

The battery situation will bite you if you are not ready for it. The EL2 is electronically governed, and without a fresh cell you get exactly one mechanical speed, 1/90, and nothing else. No battery, no camera, for any practical purpose. The cell lives in an odd spot too, under the mirror box, reachable only with the mirror locked up via the film advance. People forget this and panic when they cannot find the door. It was built for the 6-volt silver or alkaline batteries of its day, so check what a seller has crammed in there.

Aperture priority is the whole pitch. You set the aperture for the depth of field you want and let the body pick the time. That is fine in even light and treacherous in anything backlit or high in contrast, because a center-weighted meter still averages and still gets fooled by a bright sky behind your subject. This is where a Zone Light Meter reading earns its place. Spot the shadow you actually care about, decide which zone it should sit on, and dial the exposure in deliberately instead of trusting the needle to read a scene it cannot understand.

Today the EL2 sits in an awkward, underpriced corner. Collectors chase the FE and FE2; students grab the FM. The EL2 gets overlooked precisely because it is the in-between model, which means it is one of the cheaper ways into a metal-bodied, AI-coupling, aperture-priority Nikon that takes the same enormous catalog of F-mount glass. Buy one with a verified working meter and clean seals, feed it a battery, and it will quietly hold its own against bodies that get all the attention.