I’ve always loved photography, but going semi-professional – shooting motor racing – strangled that, and I stopped photographing anything for a very long time. A decade or so later, and 2018 saw me get ‘the bug’ again. Skip forward another year and a bit, and I’ve fallen, again, and expensively, for film.
I have the privilege of travelling for work to the Central West of New South Wales twice a year. After hours are typically my own, and I usually take those opportunities for photography. The night after night of clear and dark skies out there are wonderful for star gazing (though I can never help thinking of the heartache of the drought ravaged farmers praying for rain clouds). I usually shoot digital for very low light photography, such as astrophotography landscapes. There is really no other easy way to get a landscape at EV-5 and the Milky Way core above both acceptably lit and sharp in a single frame capture.
The Olympus OM-1 was always my dream camera since I got into photography in seventh grade. It took several more years of borrowing classmates’ cameras and an interlude with a Pentax ME Super before I finally got my hands on my first OM-1n, purchased with my own money in 1983. It has served me well since then, even well into my transition to digital. That said, it’s been sitting on the display shelf mostly over the last few years, so I recently decided to take it along with me to shoot at the 2019 New York Air Show.
I’ve been in possession of what has become my favourite 35mm SLR, the Olympus OM1 now for about eight months. Truth be told I have not shot it as often as I was expecting. The honeymoon period with it has faded a little. Because I now know that I can get acceptable exposures on my favourite film stocks (and some not so favourite) without too much trouble, the unpredictability of a new camera has now become the reliable and consistent. But I love the all manual nature of the Olympus OM1, and the Zuiko optics are in my opinion, exceptional.
I have a love/hate relationship with slide film. The colours are second to none and the contrast is uniquely crisp. However, the costs associated with shooting slide film seem to be increasing day to day and finding a lab that can develop it is as rare as hen’s teeth. But, to get the results I was looking for in this project, it was necessary.
