You still use an OM1?

 It's been a while, but photography hasn't stopped. My OM1 adventures were interrupted for a while by my first steps in black & white developing. Father Christmas brought me a developing tank and all the other essential bits, and the next couple of months were spent putting films through various cameras and trying to perfect the method of getting decent results from the chemistry sessions. Of course, things didn't always work as planned, and it meant that some of the photos I took were best forgotten, but after a few trials of different timings and agitation techniques, I seem to have it sorted, touch wood. So in an effort to catch up, here are a few of the recent shots from my stable of OM1s. Kodak Portra400 Kodak Ultra400, Zuiko 35-105 Kodak Ultra400, Zuiko 35-105 Kodak Ultra400, Zuiko 35-105 Kodak Ultra400, Zuiko 35-105 Kodak Ultra400, Zuiko 50mm Kodak 400tx, Zuiko 35-105 Kodak 400tx, Zuiko 35-105 Kodak Potra400 Just realised - a couple of these weren't taken wit...

 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 autom...

 When I wander around a town with camera in hand, I often ignore views and buildings because, well, they're a bit ordinary. But then our local paper runs features on its website where they dig out twenty photos of the town centre from the 1970s, and it's fascinating. Just ordinary shots of ordinary buildings, but the pictures capture the time, and we all look at them and remember.  So, in future I will try to take a few "ordinary" pictures and hope they mature into something worth looking at.  As a start, another regular feature in the local paper are the stories of pubs closing without warning. A local brewery, Sam Smiths, own about 300 pubs, mostly across the North of England, with another cluster in and around London. The northern branch of the business is run by Humphrey Smith, and while his idea of what a pub should be might appeal to some, it doesn't make life easy for the people running them. No television, no music, no phones, no electronic devices, no swe...

 The arrival of a new baby into the family is a big cause for celebration, even more so when it's your first grandchild. Of course, it is also a fine opportunity to take some photos - these moments simply have to be captured. Everybody says "they grow up fast", and it's true, so getting images of the first few weeks was something I was keen to do. It's probably true to say that of all the pictures I have taken, and will take in the future, these are the ones which will be looked at the most in 10, 15, 20, years from now. Daughter Sally gave birth to little Stanley at the end of August, and spent the first few days in a hospital room with hardly any light at all - a couple of flourescent tubes, and a small frosted window covered with a net curtain. Still, I managed to get a couple which passed my test of "worth keeping". I just opened the lens right up, took the shutter speed as low as I dare, and crossed my fingers.  After that, Stanley has been snapped ...

 It's all very well chatting about these cameras, the batteries the lenses...but what do you do with them? OK, so I have been back through some of the films I have taken since the OM1 ended up in my hands, and here are a few highlights (to me, at least).  Taken on the first day with the OM1, 50mm, Kodak Gold 200 On the shore of Derwent Water, 28mm, Kodak 400TX, Derwent Water, 28mm, Kodak 40TX York entertainer, Kodak 400TX York alleyway, Kodak 400TX Minster snappers I, 35-105zoom, Kodak 400TX Minster snappers II, 35-105zoom, Kodak 400TX Minster snappers III, 35-105zoom Kodak 400TX

 Aside from the habit of finding OM1 bodies at prices which are too good to resist, there is also the question of which lens to buy. Or rather lenses. Of course you can't just have one... I mentioned in an earlier post that prices of most OM series cameras are not too astronomical, and the same can be said for a lot of the Zuiko lenses out there. There are exceptions - the 85mm and 100mm primes tend to cost more than three or four OM1 bodies stacked on top of each other - but you can get a reasonable selection of lenses for not a huge amount of money. Now I will say from the start that I am not one of those lens fanatics who blows up the top corner of an image and points out the distortion. Not to belittle their contribution to the world of photography, but I prefer to spend my time looking at the subject of the photo. (No doubt one day I will take a photo of some parallel lines and regret those words). What I do know is that on the whole the Zuiko lenses are pretty darn good. Asid...

 Having explained how I found myself with an OM1, forty plus years after buying an OM10, it's time to look at the camera(s) I have settled on. In fact, it nearly wasn't an OM1 at all. The Contaxiia I had been happily using was out of action, and causing the repair man to scratch his head, the Kiev4a which filled in for it seemed a bit on the heavy side to carry around for evermore, and so I decided to make use of the OM lenses which I had kept from years before. A few days of online browsing and auction-watching later, I found what sounded like a really nice OM2, in full working order, cosmetically pretty well perfect, and at a price which didn't seem too steep. I went for it. But when it arrived, it only took a few minutes to realise that all was not well. The shutter speeds just didn't sound or look right. Time to do some tests... I have a small light-to-sound probe, which I plug into a laptop. Place the probe in the back of the camera and then use Audacity sound reco...