Film Cameras

Nikon F

10/15/202004/04/2025 by Maurizio Agelli

The Nikon F is probably the most famous 35mm SLR ever made. Highly innovative for its time and extremely reliable, it immediately became the most popular camera among professionals, especially those dedicated to photojournalism. Today, over 60 years after its appearance on the market, the F is still highly appreciated on the used market, both by collectors and by many enthusiasts of analog photography.

The arrival of the Nikon F

By the late 1950s, 35mm SLR cameras were by no means a novelty. Ihagee had already been producing the Exakta since 1934, a line of SLR cameras that two years later would adopt the interchangeable viewfinder. In 1948, the Rectaflex appeared (the first and only 35mm SLR made in Italy) which four years later was joined by a model featuring a three-lens turret, a design long used in cine cameras. In 1949, Zeiss Ikon of Dresden introduced the Contax S, the first 35mm SLR equipped with a pentaprism, allowing for a non-reversed left-right view. Then, in 1954, the Japanese Asahiflex became the first SLR to feature an instant return mirror (a seemingly minor advancement, yet a crucial one, as previously, the mirror remained raised after shooting and would only return to its lowered position when the film advance lever was engaged).

Before the F, Nikon Nikon had never produced an SLR. However, the company had already earned a solid reputation for the reliability of its rangefinder cameras ¹ and the quality of its lenses, to the point that it had begun to compete with Leica and Zeiss Ikon, the renowned German companies that in the 1950s were the benchmark for professionals ².

Reliability was one of the key strengths that led to the Nikon F’s success in the professional field. The camera was designed and tested to operate in extreme environmental conditions. For instance, its shutter had been subjected to tests that included up to 100,000 operating cycles ¹. No competing product was able to guarantee such reliability.

Another key factor behind the success of the Nikon F was its expandability. The camera body was at the heart of a complete system of accessories that included viewfinders, lenses, focusing screens and much more. This was a major advantage for a professional, allowing them to customize and upgrade their equipment according to their specific needs.

Nikon F Advertisement – ( *Photo by Nesster CC BY 2.0* )

When it was introduced to the market in March 1959, the first version of the Nikon F had some very advanced features for its time. Thanks to titanium curtains, the shutter could reach speeds of up to 1/1000 s. The lenses came with a bayonet mount, rather than the traditional screw mount, allowing for much quicker changes. The interchangeable viewfinder offered enormous versatility. An automatic diaphragm was not common at the time, but extremely important for single-lens reflex cameras, as it enabled the composition of the scene and focusing at the lens’s maximum brightness, regardless of the set aperture, before automatically closing at the moment of exposure.

These were the specifications of the first Nikon F:

35mm single-lens reflex (SLR) capable of producing a 24x36mm frame
Interchangeable pentaprism viewfinder with 100% coverage of the shooting field
Interchangeable focusing screen (the one supplied is a micro-prism with split image)
Interchangeable lens with Nikon F mount
Automatic diaphragm
Vertical-travel titanium focal plane shutter, with shutter speeds from 1/1000 s to 1 s (with the possibility of reaching up to 10 s using the self-timer) and B and T exposure speeds
Flash sync up to 1/60s
Self-timer, with adjustable interval from 2 to 10 s
Depth of field check button
Instant return mirror
Ability to manually lift the mirror before shooting (essential for mounting some lenses whose rear element protrudes inside the body)
No battery compartment (not needed, as the camera is fully mechanical)
Motor drive compatibility
Weight: 600g (body only, without the viewfinder), 685g (body with viewfinder, without lens)
Available in chrome or black finish

The viewfinders

The viewfinder supplied with the first model of the Nikon F was a simple pentaprism without a built-in light meter, commonly known today as an “eye-level finder”, to distinguish it from the waist-level finder which was available as an accessory at that time.

Nikon F with waist level viewfinder – Photo by s58y (CC BY 2.0)

The new lenses

Along with the Nikon F, a completely new series of lenses was designed. The lens-body pairing, known as Nikon-F, would become one of the longest-running standards in the history of photography, still used today (with some improvements) on Nikon digital SLRs.

The Nikon F mount is a bayonet type, like the one used on Nikon rangefinder cameras, but with a larger diameter mount (44mm) to allow the use of faster lenses.

On the early models of these new lenses, the term “Auto” indicated that they were equipped with automatic diaphragm. This term disappeared after a few years, when automatic diaphragm had become a common feature on all lenses on the market.

These were the first F-mount lenses, released concurrently with the Nikon F:

NIKKOR-S Auto 3.5cm f/2.8
NIKKOR-S Auto 5cm f/2
NIKKOR-P Auto 10.5cm f/2.5
NIKKOR-Q Auto 13.5cm f/3.5

At that time, focal lengths were indicated in centimetres. The lenses carried the NIKKOR name, followed by a letter indicating the number of elements (Q = four, P = five, S = six).

The Evolution of the Nikon F

The component most subject to rapid evolution at that time, and which could quickly render a camera obsolete, was the light meter. The Nikon F was designed in such a way as to completely separate the exposure metering functions from the camera body, which were instead incorporated into the pentaprism.

In this way it was possible to reuse the same camera body for all subsequent Nikon F models, which would gradually introduce increasingly advanced exposure measurement.

With the first Nikon F model, the one with the simple “eye-level” viewfinder, it was necessary to use an external light meter. You would measure the exposure, select one of the shutter speed/aperture combinations, and set these on the camera by adjusting the shutter and aperture rings.

Nikon initially made available, as an accessory to be mounted on the camera, a selenium exposure meter, called the “I-type”, which turned out to be the first in the world to be coupled to both shutter speed and aperture.³

*Nikon F with selenium light-meter (Photo by s58y CC BY 2.0* )

The light meter itself featured its own shutter speed dial that overlapped with that of the camera, coupling with it via a metal pin. In this way, setting the shutter speed on the exposure meter automatically set it on the camera as well.

The information on the actual aperture in use was instead transmitted to the light meter through a small metal fork integral with the aperture ring. When the lens was mounted on the camera body, a pin from the light meter was inserted into this fork. In this way, the exposure meter was constantly informed of the actual aperture set. Operating at full aperture (thanks to the automatic aperture) imade it essential for the light meter to receive this information.

Once the film sensitivity (in ASA, equivalent to today’s ISO) was set, it was then only necessary to set the shutter speed/aperture combination, verifying that the galvanometer mounted on the exterior of the light meter indicated that the exposure was correct.

The selenium meter did not require batteries, but had the defect of not being sufficiently sensitive in low light conditions. Consequently, in 1962 the Nikon F Photomic was introduced, featuring a pentaprism with an external metering exposure through a cadmium sulfide (CdS) photoresistor.

Nikon F Photomic (Photo by s58y CC BY 2.0)

The bulky pentaprism, like that of later models, also housed the battery compartment (PX13 mercury, no longer produced today). The correct exposure was displayed inside the viewfinder through the needle of a galvanometer.

Since the photoresistor has a “viewing” angle similar to that of a standard focal length lens (50mm), the measurement became less reliable the further the focal length of the lens mounted on the camera moved away from the standard one. Furthermore, if filters were mounted, a manual correction had to be made by rotating the ASA ring. An exposure measurement made through the lens would have solved these problems.

It was not until 1965 that the Nikon F Photomic T finally appeared on the market, featuring a pentaprism with a TTL (through-the-lens) light meter, which measured the light through the lens.

*Nikon F Photomic T (Photo by pumpkinpies CC BY-NC-ND 2.0* )

In 1967 the Nikon Photomic FT was introduced, with center-weighted TTL metering (where the brightness of the central area contributed 60% of the measurement, while the remaining 40% came from the surrounding area).

However, TTL metering introduced a new challenge: the actual exposure measurement depended on the maximum aperture of the lens. This meant that every time a lens was changed, the camera had to be manually set with this information. This process, known as “indexing,” involved adjusting an offset on the ASA dial according to the maximum aperture of the attached lens.

Fortunately, Nikon simplified this procedure with the release of the Nikon F Photomic FTn, which hit the market in 1967 , just a few months after the FT.

The FTn retained the center-weighted metering of the FT, but introduced a faster indexing procedure. Once the lens was mounted, it was necessary to first rotate it to a smaller aperture than f5.6 and then to its maximum aperture.

This allowed the indexing mechanism to semi-automatically determine the lens’s maximum aperture by measuring the angular distance between the known f/5.6 position on the aperture ring and the position corresponding to the maximum opening.

There was also the option to verify the detected maximum aperture using a small slider on the pentaprism.

The FTn was the final Nikon F model. It was so successful that it remained in production until March 1974, despite the release on the market in 1971 of the F2, the new professional SLR that would soon gain undisputed favour among photographers.

Throughout this entire period, from 1959 to 1974, the first Nikon F model, the one with the simple “eyelevel” viewfinder without a light meter, was never discontinued, although both the camera body and the pentaprism underwent minor modifications. ⁴

In total, 862,600 units of Nikon F were produced.⁵

References

Nikon Rangefinder Cameras , by Nikon Corporation[↩][↩]
Nikon F – The Camera That Changed Everything , by Josh Solomon[↩]
Debut of Nikon F , by Nikon Corporation[↩]
Nikon F Collection and Typology , by Richard de Stoutz[↩]
Robin Lenman, The Oxford Companion to the Photograph, Oxford University Press[↩]

On Slow Photography

Nikon F

The arrival of the Nikon F

The viewfinders

The new lenses

The Evolution of the Nikon F

Further reading

References

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