Picture this: a look back at the Nikon EM

Aug. 5—During my freshman year in college, I sold my first two cameras, a Fujica ST-605 and a Yashica Electro 35 GSN. I liked them both, but even at the age of 18, I knew I would want and need more — much more — out of a camera system. I loved my first cameras, but I quickly outgrew their limitations.

I turned to Nikon, which was very much the frontrunner in professional photography in 1982. The Fujica and Yashica weren't worth much, so I combined that money and some saved lunch money and visited Lawrence Photo in Oklahoma City. Photographers might recall that they went out of business decades ago.

I looked at the long glass merchandise cases at all the Nikon cameras. The most expensive at the time was the industry-leading Nikon F3, but as a starving college freshman, a flagship camera might as well have been on top of Mount Everest.

I started looking at realist options. For a short time, I actually held, and considered, the Nikon EM. It was very affordable, and not a bad-looking camera (kind of cute, actually), but it had a fatal (in my opinion) flaw: no manual exposure control. In those days, it was almost considered a sin to not shoot in manual mode.

The camera I chose, and used until it died, was the Nikon FM, followed by a couple of Nikon FM2 cameras. These cameras were tough, solid, and completely manual-everything, and I made a living with them up to the time they died, which was also the advent of the digital age.

A kind reader recently gave me an EM. It appears to be in pretty good shape. The shutter runs and it looks like it is metering pretty accurately. Instead of manual shutter speeds, the exposure mode dial simply has B, M90, and Auto.

The B setting holds the shutter open as long as you keep the shutter release button held down or open with a cable release, the Auto setting allows the photographer to set the aperture and the camera picks the shutter speed, and the M90 is an emergency 1/90th shutter speed that will run if the battery dies or is removed. There is a self-timer on the front of the camera in the traditional place, and there is a "backlight" button that serves as a one-dimensional exposure compensation feature; when you push it, the camera makes the image two stops lighter by switching the shutter speed two stops longer.

An interesting option for the EM was the MD-E motor drive, which would wind your film at a blazing two frames per second. You could use the MD-E on its successors, the Nikon FG and FG-20.

The EM was considered plasticky in its day, but in my hands it actually feels pretty sturdy. At the time of its release, 1979, Nikon's "affordable" sub-brand was the Nikkormat line, and they were made of so much steel and brass, almost every camera after them seemed plasticky.

I've got a few rolls of film, but every time I think that sounds like a project, I recall the fact that all my film is expired by about 15 years, and how much it costs to have it processed, then, of course, scanned, which just makes it back into a digital image, so I'm not seeing a real reason to do it.

I seldom saw the Nikon EM in the field, and I never put a single frame of film through one, but thanks to my reader, I have another nice museum piece in my collection.