Nikon FM2

Tap the shutter on an FM2 and you get a crisp metal snap, no hum, no buzz, because there is nothing electronic to make a sound. Pull the battery and the whole camera keeps working. Every speed from a full second up to about 1/4000 is mechanical, governed by springs and a honeycomb titanium shutter that, when the body launched in 1982, was the fastest focal-plane shutter on any production 35mm camera. That number mattered to working photographers. It let them shoot wide open in daylight without a stack of neutral-density filters, and it let them stop a sprinter cold.

Nikon built it as the no-nonsense manual counterpart to the electronic FE line, and it lands in the hand like a tool. All brass and aluminum, heavier than it looks, with a film advance lever that throws short and tight and a rewind crank that does not wobble. The viewfinder is bright, a plain ground-glass field with a split-image rangefinder spot ringed by a microprism collar, and you nail focus by eye the old way. Loading is the standard Nikon back-door affair, no quick-load gimmickry, just thread it onto the take-up spool and go.

The meter is the one piece that needs juice, and it is honest about it. Two button cells run a center-weighted reading shown as three LEDs on the right side of the finder, a plus, a circle, and a minus. You turn the aperture or the shutter dial until the circle glows alone and you are at the meter's idea of correct. It is a simple system. Not a spot meter, not matrix anything, just a center-weighted cell that leans on the middle of the frame and gets fooled by snow, by stage lights, by a bright sky over a dark street. That is the camera's honest weakness. The meter weights the center and lets the edges go, so backlit and high-contrast scenes will burn your shadows if you trust it.

That is exactly where a handheld reading earns its keep. Take a spot or incident reading from the Zone Light Meter app, decide which zone you want the shadows to fall on, and dial the body manually. The FM2 was built for that workflow. It does not fight you. The meter is a suggestion, the dials are the decision.

It earned a reputation for surviving everything. Because the guts are all mechanical, a dead battery that would stop an electronic camera does not stop the FM2, and it keeps firing in the cold and the dust. Students inherited that reputation, and the FM2 is still the body people hand a beginner who wants to learn exposure with no automation hiding the choices. Prices have climbed because of that demand, and you will cross-shop it against the Olympus OM-1 and the Pentax MX, the other small mechanical SLRs of its day. The OM-1 is smaller and quieter. The FM2 is the tank. It anchors the Nikon F mount, so decades of lenses bolt right on, and apart from those two cells in the meter, there is almost nothing left to break.