Last week I described a day out I had with an old Olympus Trip 35 which had a broken light meter.  I had such fun with that camera and enjoyed the experience of shooting manually with film so much, that I bought another Olympus Trip 35 for $20 on eBay, this time with a working meter.

Nikon D300s, AF Micro-Nikkor 60mm f/2.8D, 6secs @ f.22, ISO 800

I had to take an early morning ferry ride across Sydney Harbour to Manly during the week, so I took a couple of rolls of cheap Fujifilm Superia X-tra 400 colour film and the new camera to see how it performed.

Olympus Trip 35, Fujifilm Superia X-tra 400 ASA film

In any weather Sydney Harbour provides countless photographic opportunities.  The Sydney Opera House and the spectacular Harbour Bridge sit in the centre of a working harbour, with cruise ships, old fashioned ferries, and numerous other working vessels set against against beautiful scenery.  The 40mm lens on the Trip is ideal for capturing the wide vistas encountered on the 30 minute ferry ride from Circular Quay to Manly.

Olympus Trip 35, Fujifilm Superia X-tra 400 ASA film

A ride to Sydney’s northern suburb of Manly on the famous ferry is an essential experience for any visitor to Australia.  Locals should also take the trip more often to remind themselves what an amazingly beautiful city they live in.  The Manly ferries are large vessels which can carry over a 1000 people, mostly city commuters and tourists.  They have a few decks and plenty of space outside to take in the view and breath in the (fairly) fresh sea air.  Fortunately for the early morning journey out of the city, I was travelling against the torrent of commuters, so the ferry was nearly empty.

Olympus Trip 35, Fujifilm Superia X-tra 400 ASA film

Olympus Trip 35, Fujifilm Superia X-tra 400 ASA film

Manly is a seaside village with plenty of cafes, restaurants and a long, sandy beach known for its great surfing.  There is a particular Manly culture which is appreciated only by locals, so I won’t attempt to describe it further.  By the time I arrived the sun was high, so I knew that anything I photographed would be affected by harsh contrast.  Of course, without a rear LCD screen or histogram on the camera you’re working on instinct and a large dose of luck.  With the camera set on Auto I really just had to compose, zone focus, and shoot.

Olympus Trip 35, Fujifilm Superia X-tra 400 ASA film, cropped vertical

Olympus Trip 35, Fujifilm Superia X-tra 400 ASA film

A few days later I collected the negatives and a CD with the scanned picture files.  Some of the images were badly affected by lens flare, and others were way out of focus, but on the whole I was happily surprised with the colours and relative crispness of the images.  I applied some cropping and a little sharpness in Aperture but that was about it.  My next assignment is to try a couple of rolls of slower film, but for that I might choose a different camera from my small collection of classics.

Olympus Trip 35, Fujifilm Superia X-tra 400 ASA film

A few months ago I spent about $10 at my local thieves market on an Olympus Trip 35, thinking it would make a nice bookshelf ornament.  It did – until I stared this whole “switching to manual” blogging thing, which has made me think more about the challenges of manual photography.  So I bought a roll of Kodak BW400CN film, loaded the camera and shot 24 frames in my lunch hour last week.

Olympus Trip 35, 1/40th sec @ f.11 or f.16, ASA 400, Kodak BW400CN film

There are plenty of web sites and blogs devoted to the little Olympus Trip 35, and  several Flickr groups containing vigorous discussions about all aspects of the camera, but there’s actually not a lot to say.  They were manufactured between 1968 and 1984, with little variation in the classic design and sturdy build quality.  Mine has a chrome shutter button, which apparently means it was made before they changed to black shutter buttons in the mid-1970s.   The serial number is 1494120 in case anyone’s counting.

The camera has two shutter speeds, 1/200th sec and 1/40th sec.  It has aperture control (f.2.8 – f.22), which is designed to be used with flash only, at 1/40th sec.  At all other times the camera is supposed to be used in auto mode, with the only manual inputs being film speed (ASA 25 – 400) and zone focussing.  You focus by selecting one of four symbols on the lens dial: a single person, two people, a group, or a mountain range.  There’s also a distance scale under the lens, in both feet and meters.  Oh, and the light meter is comprised of a selenium cell around the lens, which locks the camera to prevent underexposed images.

Olympus Trip 35, 1/40th sec @ f.11 or f.16, ASA 400, Kodak BW400CN film

So I thought I was pretty special when I loaded my roll of film and wound it to the first frame.  That was until I found that the light meter in my little Trip was broken, so the camera simply locked-up in auto mode (a little red flag pops up in the viewfinder).  At first I considered removing the film and trying the same exercise in my Olympus OM2n on another occasion, but that would have left me with nothing to do for the rest of lunch, so I thought “what would someone who writes a blog called ‘Switching to Manual’ do”?  I switched to manual.

So my parameters were as follows: harsh lunch-time light, a fixed 1/40th sec shutter speed, ASA 400 speed film and an adjustable aperture range from f.2.8 to f.22, which was supposed to only be used with a flash.  I had no flash, by the way.  Thinking digitally, I also had no auto-focus, no LCD screen to review the images, no histogram, and no 16Gb memory card to take 1000 images if I chose.

Olympus Trip 35, 1/40th sec @ f.11 or f.16, ASA 400, Kodak BW400CN film

The conundrum wasn’t hard to solve.  I varied the aperture between f.11, f.16 and f.22 to cope with the fast film speed, selected the focus zones as well as a first time user could hope to do, propped the camera on some sort of support as much as possible to deal with the low shutter speed, and fired away – fully expecting to be shooting 24 blanks.

Olympus Trip 35, 1/40th sec @ f.11 or f.16, ASA 400, Kodak BW400CN film

The results are shown in this post (ignoring the majority of rejects of course) .  For me, with a broken light meter and a fixed 1/40th sec shutter speed, anything more manual than this would be a pin-hole camera, so I was pretty amazed with the results.  The only adjustments I’ve made to these images is cropping and straightening, a slight contrast boost and adding the black border – all in Aperture 3.  Obviously they’re just basic photo-kiosk standard scans from the negatives, so it’s possible the jpeg files could have been better quality if I’d gone to a professional lab.  That’s why I allowed myself the luxury of a little boost in contrast.  I also removed a few specks of dust from one of the images.

Before wrapping up, let me share some interesting insights into what this experience has taught me about the impact of the digital age on my photography, remembering that I shot with film SLRs for many years.  First, looking at the back of the camera after each shot is now ingrained into my shooting practice. I’m by no means a serial-LCD viewer, and in fact I’ve pretty much turned off the LCD screen on my Panasonic GH2, but looking at the back of the camera has become a security blanket, both to check on an uncertain capture and to break eye contact with the person I just took a sneaky photo of.  I caught myself looking at the back of the Olympus Trip 35 after each shot. Thankfully, it just looked back at me.

I also found I was a lot less concerned about framing the subject in the viewfinder, and instead was willing to be as casual about the framing as I would be if  I had an endless number of images to shoot.  That confidence helped a lot given that the camera was on the ground for a lot of the shots to cope with the low shutter speed.  I didn’t feel any guilt about cropping and straightening in software, figuring that it was really no different to what I would have done to the same image in a darkroom.

Finally, and most importantly, shooting with a 40 year old Olympus Trip 35 gave me the same pleasure that shooting with my Nikon D300s gives me, so the passion burns just as brightly without a light meter.   In fact I’ve just bought another Olympus Trip 35 off eBay (for $20 this time), and the seller assures me it works beautifully.  I’ll let you know once I’ve tried it.

Olympus Trip 35, 1/40th sec @ f.11 or f.16, ASA 400, Kodak BW400CN film