Lenses for Nikon FE2

[Garbz]

To see what kind of a image you would take with a 50mm lens just mount the Tokina, set it to 50mm and look through the viewfinder. You will find that if you look with both eyes open at 50mm on the FE2 you should see no zooming type effect. What you see in one eye should be almost identical as what you see in the other. This is what makes the 50mm so popular for the film format, it approximates the perspective that the human eye sees.

The aperture then depends on how much light is let in through the lens. The lower the number the more light is let in from closer to the edge of the lens. What it means is that f/1.8 lets in four times as much light as f/4, and f/2.8 lets in twice as much light as f/4. The additional effect is because the light comes from the edge of the lens it increase the depth of field of the photo.

Since a picture says a thousand words have a look at these:

Taken on Nikon FE with a 50mm f/1.2 lens set at f/8 on infrared film.

Taken on Nikon FE with a 50mm f/1.2 lens set at f/1.2 using high speed Illford Delta 3200 film. Picture taken in low light and without a tripod:

The ebay/amazon lens you linked to will work just fine. But the new AF models feel cheap and are somewhat nasty to manually focus in my opinion. You may be better off looking at something like this instead:

Nikon 50mm f/1.4 AIS Lens Free Ship Warranty NR - eBay (item 250348269567 end time Jan-02-09 18:21:48 PST)

Nikon Nikkor 50mm f/1.2 AI-S lens 50 f1.2 1.2 AIS SLR - eBay (item 260336532509 end time Jan-21-09 13:22:22 PST)

Nikon 50mm lens AIS - eBay (item 110330565361 end time Jan-02-09 15:09:02 PST)

There take your pick f/1.8 f/1.4 and f/1.2 each increasing in price, and unfortunately weight, but also versatility and drool worthyness. Also note that all lenses when used at their maximum aperture are often not all that sharp. So if you want to shoot mainly at f/1.8 it may still be worth getting an f/1.2 lens since it is tac sharp at f/1.8 whereas the f/1.8 is only somewhat average at that setting and starts getting really sharp beyond f/2.8. But this is a quality issue and should not really dominate your decision for a first good lens for your FE2