Nikon FM2/T

Hand a wedding second-shooter a backup body that has to ride in a bag through a Saturday in the rain, get knocked against a pew, and still fire on frame 500 when the battery quit two hours ago, and the FM2/T is the answer almost nobody can afford to give. Every shutter speed on it works with no cell in the camera at all. The battery runs the meter and only the meter, so a dead pair of LR44s costs you three LEDs in the finder and not one frame. That is the situation this body owns. An F3 or an FE loses it the second the cell goes flat.

The "T" is titanium, and it is the whole reason this one exists alongside the cheaper FM2n. Nikon swapped the top plate, bottom plate, and the film door from the usual copper-silicon-aluminum alloy to titanium, which dropped the body to around 515 grams and made the shell harder to dent than anything else in the line. It shipped in 1993 for several hundred dollars more than the standard camera, for a difference you mostly feel rather than see: the panels have a slightly warmer, satin look under the leatherette, and the thing simply does not mark up the way the standard alloy body does. Under the skin it is pure FM2n. Same honeycomb-pattern vertical metal shutter that tops out near 1/4000 with flash sync at 1/250, fast enough that you can shoot fast glass wide open in noon sun without a stack of neutral-density filters. The sound is a flat, quick metallic snap, no electronic softness to it.

Focusing runs on a split-image center collar ringed by a microprism, ground glass around that, roughly 93 percent coverage. The finder is bright and plain, no clutter, just the frame and a little LED column on the right. It is fast to nail in good light and gets fiddly in dim corners the way every split-prism does, the patch going half-black at small apertures with a slow lens. The meter is center-weighted through a silicon cell, reported as a simple plus, circle, minus stack. You turn the aperture or the speed until the circle glows and you shoot. It is not clever and it never claimed to be.

That meter is also the honest weakness. Center-weighted means it reads for whatever fills the middle, so a backlit portrait or a bright sky over a dark foreground will fool it into closing down and burying your shadows. When the scene fights the averaging, this is where a Zone Light Meter spot or incident reading earns its place: meter the face or the shadow you actually care about, place it on the zone you want, then set the FM2/T by hand. The body gives you total manual control and no excuse not to use it.

Today the FM2/T sits in a strange spot. Functionally it does nothing the ordinary FM2n cannot do, and the FM2n costs a fraction as much, so a working photographer with no sentiment buys the plain one and pockets the difference. But the titanium versions, especially the limited engraved editions, have become collector glass, and prices reflect want more than need. Buy it because you like the idea of a hand-wind mechanical Nikon that will outlast you and looks the part. Just know you are paying for the metal, not for a single extra picture.