Back in January 1981, I was in my final year at university, and after a Christmas holiday spent doing an incredibly boring job, I had more than the usual student grant money in my pocket. Enough to think about replacing the Cosmic 35 camera which had been on long-term loan from my brother for quite …
Olympus OM – 42 years, Full Circle Back to Where I Started Read More
The first week of June I made a 3 night, 700 mile trip from my home outside Indianapolis, IN to Wichita, KS. I had images in a curated exhibition at the Midwest Center for Photography and I wanted to take in the First Friday opening. The MWCP runs several open calls throughout the course of …
I used to be an avid (amateur) photographer back in those times when you either shot film, or drew/painted, to create images. Simple happy times those were… Then, around the turn of the century, digital imaging took over the photographic world like a tsunami. Sadly, film was the victim of the said flood. So badly so, that finding film in my home town became next to impossible somewhere around 2006, or so. Most camera shops gave up developing film rolls and those who didn’t, hoisted their prices ridiculously high. I took a long hard look at all the fancy new digital equipment, but found it quite unappealing. So, with a heavy heart, my camera gear was confined into the back of a closet in my study. End of story? Well, not quite…
In the late summer of 2020 I started off a film challenge over on Dyxum. I planned to shoot a whole bunch of cameras including an OM camera. Now, my own OM-1, which is an early one, suffers from a capping shutter on 1/1000. On digging it out I was rather horrified to discover that the silvering on a pentaprism was flaking.
Scratch that idea. I knew my brother-in-law had a pair of OM2n cameras, so I asked him if I could borrow one… Unfortunately my timing was bad for local lockdowns. It ended up being over six months before he was able to pass a camera to me… But when he did, the aluminium case he handed over contained three Olympus OM-2n bodies.
Berlin – capital of Germany and front line during the cold war – underwent a fundamental change during the last thirty years. Being there for the first time in 1990 right after the wall had came down, I was overwhelmed by the sheer size of the city and the very different urban layouts and appearances in the Eastern and the Western part, they even smelled differently.
