The Nikon FE, or the Quiet Pleasure of Being Flattered by a Machine

Some cameras want to be understood. The Nikon FE merely wants to be enjoyed, which is a far rarer and more civilised proposition, and one that I have spent the better part of a lifetime failing to extend to my fellow human beings. It arrived in 1978, a year I recall chiefly for my own conviction that I knew everything, and it has been gently correcting people of that view ever since. You pick it up expecting a tool and discover a temperament.

The genius of the thing is the meter, which Nikon presented not as a verdict but as a conversation. Down the left of the finder run two needles: one shows the speed you have chosen, the other shows the speed the camera would politely suggest if it were running the show. You watch them lean toward one another like a pair of old colleagues approaching agreement after a long lunch, and when they meet you feel a small, entirely unearned glow of competence. No screen has ever flattered me so successfully. The FE does not tell you that you are wrong. It tells you that you are *nearly* right, which is the only criticism most of us can bear.

It is built, moreover, to a standard that now seems faintly aristocratic. The advance lever has the action of a well-oiled drawer in a Georgian writing desk; the shutter goes off with a sound like a librarian closing a book she has decided not to recommend. And should the batteries expire at the precise moment a leopard wanders into frame — which, in my experience, is exactly when batteries choose to do it — the M90 setting and the bulb position carry on regardless, mechanically, like a butler who has not been paid in weeks but is far too professional to mention it.

What it refuses to do is intimidate you. It has aperture priority for the lazy and full manual for the deluded, and it never makes you choose a faction. You can be a thinking photographer or a feeling one, and the FE indulges both with the serene neutrality of a Swiss hotelier.

I have owned cameras that were cleverer. I have owned none that were better company. The Nikon FE does not ask you to be a genius. It simply makes a quiet, sustained, and ultimately rather moving case that you might be having more fun than you thought