Reluctant flashing

 I have never been a big fan of flash photography. It probably stems from years of using those little point and shoot cameras with built-in flash, often at parties or family gatherings. The resulting pictures of people with red eyes were one thing. But the other effect I found was that going around with a flash tends to put people off having their picture taken in the first place. Better to just point and click if you can get away with the lack of light.

So for the last few annual Christmas gatherings I have used a fast film if the room we were in was getting plenty of daylight, or not bothered if it was too dark. This year I decided to give flash another go.

The later OM models had the ability to use various Olympus flash units in fully automatic mode, where all you had to do was turn the flash on and fire away. For my OM1, that's not an option, but I decided to keep things in the family and found an Olympus T32 flash to try out. Because of the changes they made to the flash automation, there are (I think) four different shoes available, to give different levels of functionality on different OM cameras. It is all a little confusing at first, but in my case I was using the original shoe (known as Shoe 1) which was produced with the first OM1 models.

The T32 manual is itself a bit of a minefield, as it covers automatic use on later models, as well as fully manual use on the OM1 and anything else you attach it to. But once I had found the right section it was all pretty clear. On the back of the flash gun set to the film speed - 400 in my case. Set the flash guide number to 32. On the camera set the shutter speed to 1/30, and for the aperture, read the value from the distance scale on the back of the flash - probably f16 for shots from about 3-4m away.

The big benefit of the T32 over some other models is that the head can be tilted up to bounce off the ceiling, which not only gives smoother coverage, but helps solve the "don't point that flash at me" problem. So, armed with the OM1, now weighed down by the T32 and its four AA batteries, off I went to capture the Christmas gathering. And I have to say I like the results. Considering I didn't bother changing any settings once I got going, every shot was nicely lit, and well exposed. The bounce meant no red eyes, and I'm pretty sure no flash-phobics complained.