mju

I found a half dozen of the Olympus Infinity Stylus (mju) camera over the years at Albuquerque thrift stores, with prices ranging from $2 to $10.  A short time into the revival of interest in film photography I started seeing them being sold on ebay for as much as $300.  Lately, they seem to be obtainable for around $100.  I suppose the demand is driven by the same factors that made the camera very popular when it appeared in 1990.  Focusing, exposure and film advance are all automatic.  It is small enough to slip easily into a pocket, and requires only that you flip open the camera, aim and press the button to get your shot.

The fully automated camera thus fulfills most needs for most people, though it would be useful to have a little more manual control occasionally.  For instance, many modern films — both b&w and color — seem to do best when given an extra stop of exposure.  For these shots made last week in Old Town with the mju I added just a little extra time to the development to compensate for slight under-exposure.

The corner of Church and San Felipe

An Old Town cat with boundless self-confidence

A happy duck at Tingley Ponds

Coping

If the weatherman can be believed, Sunday was the last of the 100 degree temperatures in Albuquerque for at least a week.  We may even get a little rain down the road.  It took me a couple weeks to finish up the roll of film in my Olympus Infinity Stylus.  We'll now see if the cooler weather motivates me to do better.

Celebrating SF 2926

The SF 2926 locomotive has been on a siding about a mile from our home under restoration for the fourteen years that we have lived in Albuquerque.  I have visited the site many times, but on this Saturday there was a special open house to mark the completion of the project.  All that is left to do now is to get through the bureaucratic processes to get onto the tracks.

There was free food and free drinks for the whole crowd that showed up, along with a brass band and a jazz group for entertainment, and plenty of memorabilia for sale including posters, books and t-shirts.

The SF 2926 sat rusting in a city park for many years, but now it looks much as it did when it was carrying freight all over the country.

Time Travel

 After finishing the twelve black and white shots in the Argoflex Forty I made another circuit of the Albuquerque Museum car show with my Olympus Infinity Stylus (mju) loaded with Kodak Gold 200.  The little Olympus has a lot to recommend it for such events.  It is easily slipped in a pocket.  The 35mm lens is very sharp.  The auto-focus and auto-exposure seldom miss their mark.

The two-block walk back to my car found me two classics in the wild, a T-Bird and a Lotus.

C-41 Roundup

 I'm proceeding with C-41 experimentation with mixed but encouraging results.  This roll of Fuji 200 with my mju was processed for six minutes at 95F.  The shadows lost a little detail, so I may need to add a minute for the next roll.  The good part was that I had to spend very little time stamping out little white spots in the skies.  The lower processing temp does seem to help quite a bit in keeping the emulsion intact.

Albuquerque got some snow last week, but we're now back to 70 deg. temps like much of the Mountain West.

I've spent a lot of time over the years we've lived in Albuquerque at the National Hispanic Cultural Center.  They have frequently hosted very good photo exhibits, and we have enjoyed a lot of films and live performances on the indoor and outdoor stages.  I have also benefitted from the Spanish language course offerings at the Cervantes Institute.

I have not been inspired to take many pictures of the Cultural Center.  The architecture of the main buildings clearly incorporates features from both Native American and Hispanic sources, but it seems to me the architects chose  to focus on aspects of those two cultures which prioritized size and power assertions over functional quality.  

I was pleased to see recently that the Center had inaugurated a new outdoor gallery with the first exhibit being about the architecture of the site.  I thought that perhaps I would gain a new appreciation of the visual appearance of the place that has so far escaped me.  I was disappointed to find that the information presented on metal panels hung on the site's west side fence were more about the history of the site's development than about the architectural features.  Even more distressing is the fact that viewers of the exhibit are slow-moving targets on a very busy bike path.  That is something that can be easily corrected by just flipping the panels so they would be viewable from the safety of the site on the other side of the fence.  Hopefully, that will happen before someone is run down.

I have not got back inside the Albuquerque Art Museum since it reopened recently, but I have made a couple more shots of the museum shop window in an effort to capture some of the interesting colors and reflections.

Walking my mju

The Olympus Infinity Stylus (mju) metering system has an uncanny ability to get the exposure right under any condition of lighting.  

This was my fourth roll of color film in my current Unicolor C-41 kit.  I was pleased to see that the kit is mostly performing as it should.  I decided to see how it would work at a lower temperature and longer time, so I processed for six minutes at 95F.  That seemed about right,  so I'm going to stick with that time and temp, adding 2% on the time for each subsequent roll.  The normally recommended developing time of just 3.5 minutes at 102F is a little too short for comfort, and I'm thinking that a lower temp will also be a little gentler on the emulsion.

Barelas

 All the old cars in Albuquerque showed up in the historic Barelas neighborhood on Saturday for a cruise and curbside show -- restored classics, customs, and low riders.

There were a lot of bystanders and car owners on the sidewalks, so I made just quick passes up and down 4th Street shooting with my Olympus Infinity Stylus.  The little camera's sharp 35mm lens, autofocus and autoexposure easily coped with the picture opportunities and the contrasty late-afternoon lighting.  It was nice to get back to shooting color and the Unicolor kit got the job done for me.

The mju cameras

I recently came across a couple Olympus Stylus cameras at a local thrift shop, an Olympus Infinity Stylus (mju) and an Olympus Stylus Epic (mju2).  The prices were $5 for the mju and $3 for the mju2.

The mju showed a lot of use, but it had a battery and it lit up when I opened the sliding front door -- which I suppose accounted for its higher price.  The mju2 looked nice; a new battery started it up too.  

I loaded a roll in the Stylus Epic the next morning and managed to get through all 36 exposures on a roll of Fuji 200.  The camera seemed to be working nearly perfectly, though the shutter button was a little over-sensitive.  When I scanned the negatives the pictures looked good except for small light leaks in some of the images.  A bit of black tape near the viewfinder will likely solve the leak problem.

The mju2 commands ridiculous prices these days, so I was pleased to have found one that only needed a little attention to work.  On closely examining the pictures, though, I am not convinced that the camera makes pictures that are significantly superior to what I get from the mju that I have been shooting for the past ten years.  To test that idea, I finished up another roll of Fuji 200 in the older mju on a walk in the neighborhood.  I shot several of the same scenes as the day before and the light was quite similar.

The f/2.8, 35mm lens on the Stylus Epic is clearly a more sophisticated design than that of the f/3.5 lens on the older Inifity Stylus.  However, a search on the web about the newer camera turned up some support for my judgment based on my informal test.  What I found was that complaints about light leaks in the newer model are very common.  It appears that the rubber ring light seal in the Stylus Epic is not as robust as the seals in the older camera.  Additionally, I found a couple references to the idea that the auto-focusing algorithm for the Stylus Epic leaned toward wide open exposures.  So, even though the Stylus Epic has a lot of present day enthusiasts, I think there is good reason to be skeptical of any real superiority to the older Infinity Stylus.