Shooting the Olympus Pen-FT

It took me a couple weeks to work my way through a long roll of Kentmere 100 in the Pen-FT.  I have mostly shot 400-speed film in this half-frame camera as I like the faster film's ability to handle a wide range of lighting.  However, to fully appreciate the qualities of the 38mm F.Zuiko lens one really needs to shoot a slower film.  With processing in PMK Pyro I think the results rival what can be asked of full-frame 35mm images.  

These are the results from two sessions including a stroll in the riverside forest and a walk in our side yard garden to portray Margaret's prolific artichokes.

A Rough Neighborhood

 Some media attention has been given lately to the discovery and dating of the preserved footprints of humans and extinct animals in the dry bed of an ancient lake in White Sands National Monument.  The DNA of pollen associated with the prints suggests an age of twenty thousand years.  That puts the arrival of humans in the New World much further back in time than previously thought.  It also means that the humans were coexisting with some fearsome large predators including Saber-toothed Cats and Dire Wolves.

The Dire Wolf exhibit at the Natural History Museum is nicely lit by large nearby windows, making it an attractive subject for my cameras.  On this occasion I was shooting my Olympus Pen-FT with the 1.8/38mm lens.

Good for Anything That Ails You

 The Yerba Mansa has bloomed along the Rio Grande a little earlier than usual this year, perhaps because of the unusually warm weather and high water.

From a 2009 blog post:

I first encountered Yerba Mansa in a little bog between the road and the Rio Grande about twenty miles north of Las Cruces. The photo of the flower was made on June 9, 2002 using a little 1.3 megapixel OLYMPUS D360-L. A lot of water has flowed down the river since then.

So my initial knowledge of the plant coincided with the beginning of digital photography.  Since I made that first picture with the simple little Olympus D360 I have photographed the plant nearly every year since with many of my old film cameras.

Modern medicine has not found a useful remedy in the Yerba Mansa, but many Native American peoples used all parts of the plant to treat every imaginable ailment.  I'm thinking perhaps I'll try it this year in a tea.

Moving Along

 The f2/38mm lens on the Pen-FT continues to impress me with its performance in a wide variety of situations.

I met three of my fellow film photographers for coffee at a shop on Central in Albuquerque.  The half-frame vertical format encourages this kind of composite of adjacent frames.

I've shot about ten rolls of Kentmere in the Olympus Pen-FT now, and it and the fine F.Zuiko lens have performed faultlessly.  I am, however, hearing some faint grumbling comments coming from the cabinet holding my other old cameras about neglect.  I'm out of 35mm film at the moment, but I have quite a pile of Kentmere and Fomapan 120 in the refrigerator's film drawer, so there is likely some medium format in my near future.

I've run into a bump in the road regarding film scanning.  My ancient Dell computer running XT is again refusing to boot up.  That means I have lost access to my favored Silverfast for scanning and Photoshop CS2 for editing.  The pictures in this post were done with VueScan and Gimp on my old IMAC. The results aren't awful, but it takes me a lot more time and effort to get to images I consider acceptable.

Pen-FT - Roll 2

 The Day of the Dead events got underway during the weekend with a line of pickups in the Plaza Vieja decked out with ofrendas.  I had the Pen-FT loaded this time with Kentmere 100.  That gave me finer grain images than the 400-speed film of the previous roll, though in this instance I think I prefer the deeper tonal range and the enhanced depth of field provided by the faster film.  Too early to make any judgements about those issues, but I think it will be interesting to try some C-41 in both b&w and color.

The obligatory final picture of my cat was made with the F. Zuiko lens wide open at f1.8.