adetorrent; photography, lifestyle.

It was World Photography Day the other day.  I picked the Olympus OM-1 as my camera for the day  mainly because I had recently acquired it. I had also been reading a bit about some photographers of note, such as Jane Brown , that used the OM-1. I was immediately impressed with the size of the thing - so small. I later learnt that it was indeed Olympus' intention to make an SLR smaller than all the existing ones with the giant prisms.  Sound familiar? That is almost exactly what is happening today with the Olympus OMD series. To quote the oracle in Battlestar Gallactica "A ll of this has happened before, and it will happen again ". My copy came with the beautiful Zuiko 50mm f1.8 MC (marcro) lens. I am familair with the Zuiko quality, but when the photos came out, I was blown away. In fact, I commented somewhere that Olympus should have named it the "Olympus OMG!". That's how good it is. The above photo of the minibus was taken in relative...

It took long enough, but I finally got to try out the famous Olympus Trip 35 . Having used the Olympus 35 RC, RD and SP, the Trip felt both familiar and strange at first.  Familiar because of the form factor and size of the camera - it felt just like the RC in the hand.  It has the classic metal and black 1970's compact camera/rangefinder design.  The 40mm f2.8 lens also sits somewhere between the RC and RD range. That's about it. I took the Trip on a, er, trip to picturesque Eastbourne sometime this summer to test it out.  The first thing I missed was the rangefinder - there is none. Instead, it is a zone-focus camera with icons to guide you, or actual distances if you know what you're doing. I used the icons. I had problems nailing focus at first, especially just after shooting something closer up, and then forgetting to adjust the focus for something far away. Yes the camera is fully auto, but it is NOT focus-free. I often forgot that and treate...

Happy World Photography day. Today I'm out and about with this gem, the Olympus OM-1. I'm already an Olympus lover, but I'd only been using oly rangefinders.  I have to say I've quickly fallen in love with the OM-1.  The first roll is still in there, 8 frames to go I believe, but that wont be the case for long.  Heck, I've got another roll waiting to go in straight away. Enjoy photography. Take photos, love the gear. I feel privileged to be alive in the days when these cameras (and the freedom to use them) are available to us in such abundance.

I'm gearing up for some plastic point&shoot fun throughout summer. I'm going to be talking about them on my YouTube channel so subscribe to me there if you're interested .  The first is this faux-rugged thing from Japan - the Fotorama PC-500.  It's a basic, no frills point and shoot with a decent f/4 38mm focus-free lens.  It is fully automatic so you get no creative decisions to make apart from composition and whether or not to use flash.  It does however allow you to set the ASA (ISO) of 100, 200 or 400, so I suppose you could push and pull within those settings. The lens itself made of glass, so it's relatively sharp, especially in good light. I enjoyed shooting with the camera mainly because it looks and feels cool in the hands.  The shutter release action is a little quirky.  That, combined with the fact that the camera is so light, may cause blur when the camera selects a slow shutter speed - and it does often for whatever reason....

After throwing my toys out of the pram a couple of weeks ago about the Asahi Pentax Spotmatic + Super-Takumar 50mm f/1.4 setup + Expired Kodak Gold 200 setup, it's clear now that the fault was all mine.  I did not have a full grasp of the properties of expired film.  Sure, the behaviour of expired film is capricious, but apparently there are some rules of thumb I could have employed. In my second attempt, I used a fresh Agfa Vista 200 instead.  Apart from a little loss in contrast because of the almost head-on light source it was all good. I did get some looks from the restaurant staff, and a smile from a certain older gentleman across the room as I composed the photos.  A 35mm lens would have been more fit for purpose, but where can I get a 35mm f/1.4 lens without having to swap a kidney for it?

I remember when I was first searching for a good 35mm rangefinder, there came a point when it was between this one and the Canonet GIII Q17.  Goodness knows how many hours I spent watching YouTube videos and reading forum reviews, but I never did get my hands on either, until now. The Olympus 35 SP  that I found is in near-mint condition.  In my excitement I popped in the usual Agfa 200 film and headed outdoors to snap some photos before even bothering to familiarise myself with the camera first.  Besides, I'd shot so many rolls with its siblings the Olympus 35 RC and Olympus 35 RD, it's pretty much second nature to me now.  Boy, was I wrong. Straight away I couldn't understand what the heck I was looking at when I looked through the viewfinder.  The RD, and even better, the RC spoils you with speed/aperture information in an easy to understand way.  What I could see in the SP were a bunch of numbers I was sure meant something, just not to ...

I had been cured of GAS, briefly. I came across this beauty for a very affordable price and I had to have it.  The Asahi Pentax Spotmatic itself wasn't what caught my attention at first, but rather the lens mounted on it - the Super-Takumar 50mm f/1.4! I couldn't believe my eyes. I assumed something must have been seriously wrong with the camera. I picked it up for a quick inspection; looked through the viewfinder expecting to see a giant fungus obstructing my view, but no, my view was crystal clear.  I then went ahead to play with different shutter/aperture combinations and sure enough, absolutely smooth on every setting. I grabbed it, parted with very little money, and jumped on my imaginary getaway horse and rode hurriedly into the sunset. After both my Prakticas broke  and the Helios lens on my Zenit-E got slightly damaged, I'd been looking for another reliable SLR.  I couldn't wait to take the Spotmatic out for a spin, so I loaded a Kodak Gold 200 film w...

Just like that, I was handed a  Zenit-E by an elderly Slovakian gentleman. It had been well looked after, loved even - obviously, and it came complete with it's original everything. I was happy. I was very happy indeed. The Zenit-E I believe was manufactured in western Moscow between the mid sixties to the early eighties.  It's a rugged-as-heck pentaprism SLR camera capable of shutter speeds from B to 1/500. The default lens is the Helios-44-2 58mm f/2. It also has an inbuilt selenium cell exposure meter, which means no batteries are required what so ever.  However the meter is not TTL, so it is somewhat equivalent to carrying a standalone meter. I let this camera sit on the shelf for a few months before even loading it with its first roll for two reasons.  One, I had a few other cameras ahead of this one to test.  Two, I found the exposure meter a bit baffling at first, and after playing with it for a few hours and figuring it all out, decided to ...