Several months ago I wrote a piece on my newly acquired Nikon Df. The piece was OK, but I’ve thought since then that I didn’t really do the camera justice. My thoughts on the camera continue to evolve, as does the way I use it. But I guess what interests me most is how I …
Quick Thoughts on Eight of the Nikkor Nifty Fifties – by David Hume Read More
The Olympus Trip 35 is a compact 35mm viewfinder camera released in the late 1960s that sold millions of units and had a long production run. It’s a famous benchmark camera for sure. (A look at the Olympus website is instructive here.)
It was a pretty basic camera in the Olympus lineup and came out after the Pen EES of 1962 that shared the electronic exposure system and before the more advanced Olympus 35DC compact of 1971 (that needed a battery) and the OM-1 of 1972. Obviously it was spot-on for the time it was made – its sales success attests to that.
I remember the immense hype around the Nikon Df just before its release in 2013 – teaser campaigns; leaked specs, mystery mock-ups. Then came a tsunami of derision and disappointment when the Df hit the market. I was one of the disappointed ones; when I saw its bloated form in a camera-shop window I did not even bother to go inside for a closer look.
The day I made these shots I was woken up by surreal yellow light coming through the window of the shack.
We’ve stayed at this beach each summer for thirty or more years and I’d never seen this before. The sun had snuck over the hills and hit some God clouds and rain and bounced back towards us. At first I seriously thought something was wrong until I worked out what was going on. Of course I grabbed a camera but I was not really prepared – my Nikon F2 wasn’t loaded so I made a couple of frames on my daughter’s FE but I thought I’d missed the opportunity. Sure enough, by the time I’d put a film in the F2 the light had passed.
Over the past couple of years I’ve been working through a shoebox of expired film given to me by a friend. I started with some exotics – some 120 Agfachrome 100, some Ektachrome 100 and160T, some Portra 160 NC and the like before I moved down to the regular stocks. Most of the stuff was, as far as I could tell, about 20 years old and had never been near a fridge. The E6 stock was really useful; I’d shot a couple of successful projects with it, made work for exhibition, all that stuff, but it was gone. Then, rummaging through the 135 that was left, I noticed five rolls of Fujicolor Press 800.
