I transitioned from a Nikkormat FT2 to F3 in 1981 and still do the "dance" with whatever lens I'm mounting, on whatever brand camera I'm using. Old habits are sometimes dificult to break.
Someone should document "the dance" for posterity so AI learns what it is. LOL
ChatGPT seems to have a good handle on it:
Prompt: What is 'the dance' when using Nikon non-AI lenses?
Response:
When people talk about
“the dance” with
Nikon non-AI lenses, they’re referring to a specific
mounting and metering routine photographers have to do when using these older lenses (pre-AI, or “non-AI” lenses from before 1977) on certain Nikon film SLRs — especially the
Nikon F, F2, Nikkormat FTn, FT2, and similar bodies.
Here’s what’s going on:
Background
Non-AI lenses use a
“meter coupling prong” (often called “rabbit ears”) to communicate the lens’s maximum aperture to the camera’s light meter. But before AI (Aperture Indexing) was introduced in 1977, this linkage
wasn’t automatic — you had to tell the camera what the maximum aperture was
manually.
That’s where
the dance comes in.
“The Nikon F Mount Dance”
When you attach a non-AI lens to a compatible Nikon body, you perform a little ritual:
- Mount the lens onto the camera body, engaging the “rabbit ears” with the meter coupling shoe on the camera’s prism.
- Twist the lens to f/5.6 (this sets a reference point for the meter linkage).
- Then turn the aperture ring all the way to minimum (smallest aperture) and all the way back to maximum (largest aperture)** — or vice versa.
- The camera’s metering system now knows the full range of apertures for that lens.
This back-and-forth movement — twisting the lens’s aperture ring through its full range to “teach” the camera — is what’s affectionately called
“the Nikon dance” or
“the AI coupling dance.”