So how about the name on this one? I have to assume that’s pronounced with the long “I” as in “Nikon.” In fact, I’ve heard an old photographer say “Nikkor lenses” with a long “I,” so that has to be right.

Right? God, I hope so. Japanese names for things just don’t often translate well into English, which is understandable given the vast distance between the two languages on a linguistic level. The Nikkormat’s predecessor, the Nikkorex F, just sounds like a prescription nicotine patch for smoking cessation when you say it with a short “I,” but “Nikkormat” sounds inexcusably rude said that way. And it’s not intuitive to say it any other way. I mean, we could try a longish “E” sound like in Japanese…

Now, I have experience with the Nikkorex F. It’s a camera built like a main battle tank, weighty and tall in the hand. It’s a manual-only camera unless you happened to buy the clip-on selenium match-needle deal; in fact, it was my first manual-only SLR, when I

bought one from Leaman’s Antique Shop in Hattiesburg a year ago. I learned the value of shooting half box speed (or lower) on that camera. And it’s solid. I fully expect it to outlast many of my other cameras, with its metal-blade Copal Square shutter.

But when I had a little extra money in my pocket last week, and saw a listing for its shiny, fully-TTL-metered little sibling the Nikkormat FTn for only $10 plus shipping, I bought it. I had seen one in an antique store on Decatur St. during my adventure losing a roll in the Minolta, and been rather taken with it. Moreover, any number of people had talked it up to me online.

Like the Nikkorex F, it’s a working-man’s Nikon. It doesn’t have interchangeable viewfinders or fancy add-ons like the Nikon F, but it does have a superior shutter (a Nikon-built version of the Nikkorex’s Copal) and center-the-needle metering, plus shutter-speed display in the viewfinder and mirror lock-up (for rangefinder-style ultra-wide lenses that stick into the camera.)

But that’s only part of why it has a cult following, I think. It’s big, but balances gracefully in the right hand. It has an aesthetic like no other camera, resembling at first glance a hybrid of the Nikkorex F and the Nikon F, but upon closer inspection resembling neither too closely. In fact, looking at it, you can’t quite place it in time, even if you know your history well. The lettering of the nameplate is almost Comic Sans, and the standard lenses of the time had happy pastel color-coding for the apertures, but overall this camera has the look of a 30’s or 40’s typewriter with slick styling but

a lot of exposed mechanisms; as if advanced 35mm SLR’s were even a figment of someone’s imagination in 1945. If my SR-T 200 is rather forward-looking in its design, its contemporary over here is oddly and pleasantly backward-looking. It’s as if someone at Nippon Kougaku in 1967 decided that Oliver typewriters, steam trains and the original Kodak 35mm’s were all great things to draw on when designing a brand new, advanced SLR.

So how is it? It takes getting used to, that’s for sure. The only way to control the shutter speed is a tab that sticks out from a ring around the lens mount; the actual ring is too slick and too recessed to grasp. As the mechanisms for sensing the aperture stick out too far, you can barely see the numbers on the ring; the indicator for the current shutter speed is only visible from the front. Luckily, the designers continuously adjusted the design of the FT series according to popular criticism and suggestions, and on the FTn, they put an indicator in the viewfinder so that you can always see what shutter speed is set–as long as you’re in good light. There are a lot of coaxial rings moving around the lens, and finding the aperture ring can be tricky on some lenses. For another thing, like the metered prism for the Nikon F, there’s a complicated procedure for mounting the lens, a little something old photographers call the Nikon dance. Basically, you have to tell the camera what the aperture range on the lens is. Why it needs to know is beyond me; the SR-T’s just sense the number of stops down from wide open and do just fine. This process got simplified from the FT, but it’s still complicated and the big selling point of the otherwise-similar FT3 was that it could sense the aperture range on AI-type lenses automatically. Setting the film speed is a real pain. Finally,  like most 60’s SLR’s it lacks a hot shoe, since most flashes used a PC cable back then, and you were apparently supposed to buy a cold shoe that was attached to the eyepiece, if you didn’t want to hold the flash. It’s a lot to figure out.

But there’s something wonderful about the quirkiness of this damn thing. I can’t disagree with the designers’ ideas of aesthetics, because in fact, the camera looks incredible. There are odd little features, like the exterior meter needle and the stop-down button in a semi-convenient location on top of the camera, rather than on the crowded lens mount area. The advance lever is a single piece of metal with light knurling, and it feels quite comfortable and solid to advance. The frame counter (broken on mine) is huge and conveniently placed (because there’s no shutter dial there in the crook of the advance lever).

You know what it reminds me of, in the end? A Retina Reflex IV. This was an unreliable, over-engineered Nagel A.G. camera sold by Kodak a little before the Nikkormat was built, but based on engineering philosophy dating back to the 50’s. It had the exterior meter needle, the ability to meter for bulb exposures, the shutter speed in the viewfinder, that kind of aesthetic that would have never seemed quite new and so never seems quite old… and I’ve always wanted a Retina Reflex IV. Sure, it’s not very practical, but there’s something about it, and there’s something about the Nikkormat.

I guess what I’m saying is, this camera is a little like vaporwave*. It doesn’t seem to belong to its home era, or even another era, not cleanly, at least. But like vaporwave, it gives you that feeling of false nostalgia you maybe had when you were younger, when you didn’t know what time it was that you were yearning for, when the details of that time could be vague. I dunno, is that why people watch Stranger Things? Is Stranger Things still popular?

 

So next I’ll fiddle with the film-speed settings some more (because this thing is sensitive to voltage differences, apparently,) shoot this roll, develop it and talk about the results.

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* Vaporwave is a whole genre that’s basically the feel of the synth line in Gary Numan’s Cars. It’s designed to make you feel untraceable false nostalgia for the 80’s and 90’s, even and especially if you only marginally experienced them. Press play and you’ll understand.

All images in this article were found marked for commercial reuse and are not mine.

Sorry there weren’t more pictures when this was first published. I couldn’t get the images to stay the size I set them at at first.