Nikon S2

Nippon Kogaku had spent decades grinding lenses for microscopes and the military before it decided to build a whole camera, and the rangefinders were the only ones it ever made. The S2 was the one that got it right. It landed in December 1954, eight months after Leitz dropped the Leica M3 and rewrote everyone's expectations overnight, and you can read the whole thing as Tokyo's answer to that. The earlier Nikon S had a small, squinty finder and a knob you cranked between frames. The S2 fixed both at once, and it became one of the most popular bodies of the whole S line, made in large numbers.

The finder is the headline. It is life-size, 1.0x, so you frame with both eyes open and the world outside the camera and the world inside it are the same size. After a Leica or a Contax that shrinks everything down, it feels like someone took the back off the camera. There is one frame line, for the 50mm, and that is the catch: wider or longer than fifty and you are clipping an accessory finder into the shoe and metering by feel. The rangefinder patch is bright and the focusing wheel under your right thumb is fast once your hand learns it.

Then there is the advance. Nikon swapped the old knob for a single-stroke lever, and it changed how the camera handles completely. You shoot, you flick, you shoot again, fractional strokes and all. The horizontal cloth focal-plane shutter runs a full second down to about 1/1000, with flash sync at 1/50, and it has the soft cloth whisper rather than a metal clack. Build is brass and chrome and it has the density of a tool, not a toy. Loading is through a removable back rather than the bottom-load fiddle of a screw Leica, which press shooters loved.

Who carried it: working photographers, drawn by the same thing that gave Nikon's rangefinders their reputation among news and wire shooters in the 1950s, Contax-grade glass on a body you could actually rely on. The S-mount Nikkors from this era, the 50/1.4 in particular, are why people still chase these. Today the S2 sits below the SP and the S3 in collector money, which makes it the sensible way into the system if you actually want to shoot rather than display.

The honest weakness is that there is no meter, none, not even a dead selenium cell to apologize for. This was a body built for photographers who read light in their heads. That is also the freedom of it. Set the body on a strap, take an incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app, place your shadows where you want them, and transfer the numbers to the dials. It is the meter the S2 never shipped with, and it keeps a seventy-year-old camera shooting like it left the bench yesterday. The other thing to know going in: budget for a CLA. Decades-old cloth shutters drag and the slow speeds lie until someone services them.