There is nothing I love more than a hobby which allows me to spend lots of money as well as do a lot of research! I have only recently gotten back into photography and have ended up in the realm of old 35 mm film photography and cameras.
What I love about 35 mm film is that it is able to satisfied both of these requirements! I have become particularly fond of the Olympus camera systems. For a techie nerd like me they really represent some fantastic innovation, and I have come to love my OM2N as well as my Olympus Trip and Olympus PEN cameras and more recently have picked up the Olympus XA fantastic as rangefinder.
Even though it really is a great and interesting hobby something that I have not been prepared for is some of the difficulties that can emerge from using these frankly, pretty old cameras. One example of this was my experience of purchasing the PEN-EES2. This is a half frame camera (designed to help snappers save money on film, half the frame – twice the photos!) and I absolutely love the idea of half frame photography. There are a number of models available, but this model offers the classic auto exposure as well as a range of zone focus options – a really great piece of innovation. Something I really love about these is the selenium meter which means that the camera is able to automatically expose an image accurately without the use of a battery. Though these can be prone to failing the one I have seems perfectly, accurate.
I purchased one and had to return it as the shutter blades were sticking. This can be a common fault with all the cameras where oil to migrate onto the aperture blades meaning that they will not respond properly/jam when you take a photo. I returned to the camera and just before I was about to leave for a work trip to Morocco, I had a notification from the original seller saying that they had a new one but they had in and had been refurbished and was ready to go – exciting times!
I didn’t have time to test the camera so I threw it in my bag and shot three rolls of film while in Morocco (remember half frame, twice the pics – it was close to 150 photos in all). It was only upon my return that I found the results below.
When the lens had been put back together as part of the refurbish something hadn’t been replaced properly, so not a single image for the trip was in focus. I returned to the seller who fixed the issue and as an apology completely repaired my faulty Olympus Trip. The story continues however as as receiving the camera back and testing on the second role I realised there were a number of light leaks on the images. It went back to the seller who can’t figure out where these leaks might have came from so replaced all the seals for me and I’m still waiting to test the camera out to see if this has been resolved.
Now onto the Olympus this is a fantastic rangefinder and there’s no one for an amazingly sharp lens on my first test roll I took it out for a spin and realised that almost everything shot at infinity had an almost double vision quality to it.
After a bit of research suggested this may be camera shake due to not being used to handling such a small camera so I went and shot an entire roll at infinity very very carefully. Sadly the results came back and were equally disappointing infinity. Off the camera went and then came back. I shot almost an entire role at infinity and was pretty happy with the results see below.
Something I did notice now however, was that the closer focus seem to be slightly out.
I go again with another test role. Here I use the rangefinder to shock and then immediately would use a measuring tape to measure the distance and set the distance manually. I suspected the. whole near focus was out of alignment by a degree of about 30 cm the closest point up to about a meter at the furthest.
Though 30 cm doesn’t sound like a huge amount when you are dealing with objects that are closer it is the difference between a face being in focus or a background subject being in focus. I do suspect this is a fairly straightforward issue to solve at this point but it decided to now return the camera.
I’ve come to the conclusion that for me it is far more cost and time efficient to sink money in at the offset for a fully tested and evidence tested camera, as opposed to looking for a bargain. I have already ordered a new XA from a more reputable source than eBay but think there may come a time where I have to accept that these old devices will come with their own issues and quirks and if I’m going to be playing around with technology that is decades old and may have to accept some of these developing issues as a reality.
As a final more positive note however, I am in love with the 35mm shooting process – especially now I am developing at home. For a while I was worried that I would lose love for digital, but now I am striking a nicer balance………….so…….which camera next…………
