Making room for one more

This Nikon FE showed up at my door recently looking for a new home.  I'm not exactly short of old film cameras, but who could turn away a perfectly preserved and working classic Nikon slr?  This one came with a Nikkor f1.8 50mm.  It has some sophisticated electronics including aperture-priority auto-exposure, but also allows full manual control of f-stops and shutter speeds.  Judging by the serial number this FE seems likely to have been manufactured mid-way through the camera's 1978-1983 production run.  So, this is one of the newest cameras in my collection.  I could tell from the smooth movements and sounds that there was likely nothing amiss with the camera, but of course I had to pop in a roll of Tri-X to give it a quick trial run.

To say that I've had an on-again/off-again relationship with Nikons is something of an understatement.  My first was a Nikon S rangefinder which I picked up around 1963; it had a fabulous lens, but that didn't stop me from selling it for a song in a fit of stupidity after shooting it a couple years.  I then skipped over Nikon development for the next couple decades before buying one of the company's early CoolPix digitals.  I kept that one just a couple years too; it wasn't a bad camera, but it became quickly obsolete and I gave it away to a neighbor.  A Nikon EM that I found a couple years ago at a yard sale performed erratically and likely won't see much use.  Now, I'm really pleased to have another shot at getting familiar with one of Nikon's great cameras from the film era.