Small, But Mighty

The Olympus 35RC looks like a traditionally designed rangefinder camera, but it is scaled down to palm size while still making full-frame 35mm images.  The shutter-priority auto-exposure is reliably accurate.  Shutter speeds range from 1/15 to 1/500.  The lens is a sharp 2.8/42mm 5-element E. Zuiko.  The viewfinder is  bright and the rangefinder features good contrast and fast focusing.

 

I loaded a roll of Kodak UltraMax 400 and carried the 35RC around for a week, visiting my usual haunts around Albuquerque's Old Town.  I've gotten in the habit of giving most of the films I use an extra stop of exposure beyond the box speed.  However, the UltraMax 400 really seems to yield better results without that extra push.

 

 The UltraMax grain pattern is quite fine for a fast film,and the speed yields good versatility, producing well-exposed images in both bright and low light scenarios.

 

I particularly like 400-speed film for sunny day hip shooting.  With the focus set to ten feet, the shutter at 1/500 and a f16 aperture, about anything you point the camera at is going to be focused and sharp .

I finished off the roll on a Friday morning in the Plaza Vieja.  The sleek Pontiac hardtop was one I hadn't seen there before.  The little '32 Ford Victoria got to show off its engine.

More from the 35RC

 While I've mostly focused on pinhole work over the past couple weeks the Olympus 35RC also rode along in a jacket pocket.

The film in the Olympus was Arista Ultra Edu 200, which I shot at 100 ASA with the intention of development in PMK Pyro for the best tonalities and grain.

The roll of Arista included a series of hipshots made on a busy Saturday morning in Old Town.

The diminutive size and quiet shutter of the Olympus 35RC make it the ideal camera for street work, but it would have been better in this instance to have loaded some faster film which allows better depth of field and faster motion stopping shutter speeds.  In the past my go-to film for this task was Tri-X.   I'm thinking now that it would be interesting to try pushing the Arista 200 in development to 400 ASA or faster, perhaps in HC110. 

The Well Travelled Olympus 35RC

The Olympus designer, Maitani, radically scaled down the form of the 35mm camera that had evolved over the years while maintaining the features and functionality that made the format so popular. The result was the perfect travel camera.  While my travel these days is mostly on foot and close to home, over a twenty year period my little 35RC managed to log a lot of miles.

---

Maine

---

New York

---

Greece

---

El Paso

---

Mesilla

---

Rincon

---

Albuquerque

Exercising the Olympus 35RC

I spent the week carrying around my Olympus 35RC.  It is a camera I have had for a long time, but I haven't often put film in it.  I think I bought this one in Las Cruces about fifteen years ago for around $40.  I subsequently found a couple others in thrift stores.  

The 35RC was built for Mercury batteries, but the meter is easily adjusted to use available 1.5 volts ones.  The five-element 2.8/42mm lens is sharp and contrasty. 

Andrew Yue has a nice review of the 35RC's features and operation.

Click here to see all my posts and pictures about the Olympus 35RC.

A Little Snow

A little snow goes a long way in Albuquerque. We got about a half inch last night. This morning, university offices and all the public schools closed for the day.

Most of my spare time lately has been devoted to getting my plate camera ready to make pictures.  When I've taken a break from that project and gone for a walk around the neighborhood, I've carried along my little Olympus 35rc.  It is a marvelous little rangefinder designed by the incomparable Maitani.

La Bajada

I drove an hour north of Albuquerque yesterday to enjoy the morning's cool breeze and a sunrise walk at La Bajada.

La Bajada is best known today for the remnants of the old Route 66 alignment which snakes up over the escarpment above the Santa Fe River. That famous roadway, however, was preceded by older north/south routes including the colonial Spanish Camino Real which stretched all the way from Mexico City to Santa Fe. Before that, the local native people followed trails across the mesas and down the river canyon for thousands of years. Many petroglyphs can be seen on the slopes beside the eroded Bajada roadway which are thought to date mostly from the height of the Puebloan period between AD 1300-1600.

An acequia at the base of the escarpment carries Santa Fe River water to cultivated fields and pastures around the village of La Bajada.

Petroglyphs along the La Bajada route are mostly in the Rio Grande style.  Some like the small horned serpent figure are nearly identical to glyphs at La Rinconada forty miles to the south.

The Sandia Mountains east of Albuquerque can be seen in the far distance in the scene below.  In the foreground a large, cryptic design covers the upper surface of a large basalt boulder.  On the other side of the boulder there are a number of zoomorphic figures.

There are said to be petroglyphs all along the five-mile stretch of the Santa Fe river canyon between La Bajada and La Cieneguilla where there is a concentration of thousands of petroglyphs along the rimrock above a marshy area.

Perhaps when the weather cools in the Fall I'll try hiking to the top of La Bajada and down through the river canyon.