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05-17-2017, 11:30 AM - 3 Likes   #1
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The HALF-FRAME-35mm Club

Welcome to the place to discuss your half-frame 35mm film photography and to post photos resulting from it!

In deference to the indisputable fact that Pentax did not make any general production professional or consumer-grade half-frame 35mm SLRs or even half-frame rangefinders or other point-n-shoot half-frame 35mm cameras. I have located this thread in the "Non-Pentax Cameras" section of our forum. It is true that the overwhelming majority of half-frame 35mm cameras were small, without interchangeable lenses, and made by a variety of other makers in Japan, as well as in Europe and perhaps other places.

This is not to say, however, that Pentax was entirely separate from the half-frame 35mm format, since they did make a limited production half-frame K-mount SLR body intended for medical, scientific, and other research purposes. Most commonly these were connected, via an adapter, to an endoscopic lens to take 1/4 second, artificially lit, portraits of someone's colon polyps. Were one of us to find one of these cameras in a retired gastroenterologist's yard sale, we would not easily find technical information about it or much detailed guidance about how to most easily adapt it to more general photography. Also, at least one craftsperson modified one or more full-frame Pentax SLRs to half-frame, but these are exceedingly rare.

A more likely Pentax connection to half-frame 35mm photography becomes possible for anyone with either an Olympus Pen F compact interchangeable lens 35mm SLR or with a Konica Auto-Reflex Full-frame/Half-frame (switchable!) normal sized 35mm SLR. If you have the appropriate m42 mount adapter, either of these cameras can use any Pentax screw-mount lens to take half-frame pictures.

Consequently, most posters in this thread will likely be shooting non-Pentax cameras, however, anyone who is using a rare Pentax half-frame camera or other half-frame camera with a Pentax (or Pentax compatible) lens, you are very welcome to participate here. As all of us are Pentax lovers, you can be sure of finding interest in what you, too, are doing.

- - -

Recently, I started a thread asking whether there was interest in a half-frame club, but I may have learned more from folks not interested, than those interested. Parallel to that thread, however, I discovered a new post, in another thread I follow, about half-frame Ilford FP4 images taken with a Russian Chaika camera. In fact there are several Pentax Forum posts referring to the Chaika, so obviously half-frame 35mm enthusiasts are among us--they just didn't happen across my thread inquiring.

So, I thought, why not just start the thread, and plant the seed, and see what grows?

- - -

A few final points for anyone who might not know:

- During the height of Half-frame 35mm popularity, most people shot medium-speed (80-125 iso) black-and-white film, AND the typical drugstore snapshots were printed on 3-inch-wide glossy paper, with borders. Despite the smaller frame size on the negatives, half-frame 35mm performed very well in that environment.

-- When the half-frame 35mm format was popular, many people also listened to monaural records and watched black-and-white TV, because at the time stereo and color TV were much more expensive. Using half-frame to take your snapshots was also less expensive, since you got twice the exposures per roll of film purchased.

-- While half-frame 35mm could be called too small a film format, by anyone who considers 35mm the minimum-sized film format worth using, size 110 film, a later mostly color film craze (for which Pentax made an interchangeable lens SLR system), has a frame area that is a mere 51% the size of half-frame 35mm.

-- Half frame cameras normally shoot images in a vertical (portrait) oriented format. You have to turn them on their sides to take horizontal (landscape) oriented images, but it really isn't that hard to do. You just see the world through the viewfinder first in portrait mode, before you decide what you want to do.

-- If the recent resurgence in half-frame 35mm use among the "lomography" crowd doesn't float your boat, don't let that preclude any idea you might have that the format can be used with other aesthetics in mind.

- - -

Now, lets see those half-frame photos and discussion relating to how you took them!

---------- Post added 05-17-17 at 01:50 PM ----------

Just to help get things rolling, I thought I would post some examples from my very first roll of half-frame 35mm film, recently taken with the very compact Olympus Pen EES-2, mostly using its automatic exposure function. The camera has a D. Zuiko f2.8 30mm lens, a "normal" lens for the format, having four "zone focusing" selections. These are shot with Kodak UltraMAX 400 film, and so are grainier, certainly above 4x6 inch, than would happen with a good medium-speed or slow film. I hope others will soon post some examples showing what half-frame can do with truly fine grain film.













I'm looking forward to others' posts....


.


Last edited by goatsNdonkey; 05-17-2017 at 05:01 PM.
05-17-2017, 09:04 PM   #2
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I'm in with this Chaika and FP4.
This film isn't super fine grain, but as you point out the half-frame has much more area that 110 or disk formats. The grain is never as prominent as I expect.

Last edited by clicksworth; 07-22-2017 at 10:00 AM.
05-18-2017, 08:22 AM   #3
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QuoteOriginally posted by clicksworth Quote
I'm in with this Chaika and FP4.
This film isn't super fine grain, but as you point out the half-frame has much more area that 110 or disk formats. The grain is never as prominent as I expect.
clicksworth , for some reason, I don't really know why, I find grain more pleasing in black-and-white images. Maybe that comes from shooting a fair bit of Tri-X years ago. When you post more, do tell a bit more about your Chaika. This, as with other club threads, might be a place people will turn to to learn more about some of the equipment related to the topic. I will post a couple of pictures of the Pen EES-2 and tell a bit more about its specs, use, and potential problems in a day or so.
05-18-2017, 08:37 AM   #4
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I had an Olympus Pen EE-2 for an age before I went to SLR, and that produced very nice 6 x 4 glossies when it had plenty of light to work with - otherwise it produced muddy garbage. I hope to get it back one day if it still exists - my grandmother bought it (in anticipation) to take pictures of me with. Back in the day I had to set the ASA and trust to it knowing what it was doing (including, thankfully at the time, refusing to fire if the light was too dim) - but it also had manual f-stops for flash photography, and if only I had known what the X-sync speed was (1/40, I recently found out), I might have used it in Sunny 16 mode. By now the selenium meter is probably dead or unreliable, so Sunny 16 will probably be a necessity if it ever falls into my hands again.

In this day and age, those who develop and digitise their own film will be at a huge advantage with half frame - their photography costs in terms of film will approximately halve, depending on how many shots they sacrifice in the leader. Of course it will take you forever to finish a 36 shot roll, but on the upside you can take a heck of a lot of shots before you have to reload - probably as many as the early digital cameras.

Anyone with ready access to home-brew development (Caffenol) and fixation (thiosulphates) will be in a very good position indeed.

05-19-2017, 09:07 AM   #5
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QuoteOriginally posted by pathdoc Quote
I had an Olympus Pen EE-2 for an age before I went to SLR, and that produced very nice 6 x 4 glossies when it had plenty of light to work with - otherwise it produced muddy garbage. I hope to get it back one day if it still exists - my grandmother bought it (in anticipation) to take pictures of me with. Back in the day I had to set the ASA and trust to it knowing what it was doing (including, thankfully at the time, refusing to fire if the light was too dim) - but it also had manual f-stops for flash photography, and if only I had known what the X-sync speed was (1/40, I recently found out), I might have used it in Sunny 16 mode. By now the selenium meter is probably dead or unreliable, so Sunny 16 will probably be a necessity if it ever falls into my hands again.

In this day and age, those who develop and digitise their own film will be at a huge advantage with half frame - their photography costs in terms of film will approximately halve, depending on how many shots they sacrifice in the leader. Of course it will take you forever to finish a 36 shot roll, but on the upside you can take a heck of a lot of shots before you have to reload - probably as many as the early digital cameras.

Anyone with ready access to home-brew development (Caffenol) and fixation (thiosulphates) will be in a very good position indeed.

pathdoc, it's interesting to hear of your experience with a Pen EE-2 back when they were a current camera. Do you recall what kind(s) of film you normally shot in it then?

In my 53 exposures on my 24-exposure roll, I got two or three that just didn't seem to have anything in particular in focus, perhaps similar to the "muddy" results you sometimes got. They were taken where there was lower light, and I framed a range of subject matter with way too much depth in it for the aperture the camera must have selected. However, with some other pictures taken in the same light, when I did my best to nail the focus on a particular element in the image, the shots seem to turn out fine. But "nailing the focus" with this little camera is NOTHING like trying to do it with an SLR. It's manual says that the four zone-focusing points equate to 3.3 feet (1 m), 5 feet (1.5 m), 10 feet (3 m), and Infinity, so you have to be able to estimate those distances pretty well...or, if it is convenient, say when using a tripod on an immobile subject, even measure them. Then if the auto-exposure system in the Pen pops the aperture open to somewhere between f2.8 and 5.6, the picture might come out pretty well.

With two shutter speeds to chose between (1/40th & 1/200th) and apertures from f2.8 to 22, the camera can theoretically accommodate a lot of exposure values, and ought to be able to accommodate either low light or low iso film, or even both, but the photographer might have to be especially wary of the hazards of wide apertures and the slower shutter speed for certain subject matter.

From what I have read the selenium cell arrays don't often go bad in these cameras, but very often, by this point in their age, the auto aperture system sticks. There is a reasonably good tutorial for fixing that problem (later I'll post a link to it), but in the case of my camera, which had that problem when I got it recently, the mechanism starts sticking again. It worked pretty well for that one roll of film, but I'm having trouble with it again. Unfortunately, the manual apertures (which you mentioned will work with the 1/40th second shutter speed) are also stopped by the sticky mechanism. I am wondering whether there is a stuck pivot point or weak spring somewhere else in the linkage that is keeping the usual treatment from solving the problem with my camera. It makes me wish I could just pop a completely manual lens and shutter system on the front of it.


= = = =


clicksworth, your black-and-white reminded me that there were a few images from that roll shot in my Pen that seemed to look better converted to black-and-white. Sometimes something about the composition calls for the added abstraction of monochrome, or sometimes it is because the shrill colors Kodax UltraMAX can put out make me want to see an alternative rendition of the picture. Here are a few:









-/-
05-19-2017, 12:15 PM - 1 Like   #6
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QuoteOriginally posted by goatsNdonkey Quote
Do you recall what kind(s) of film you normally shot in it then?
I was in my late teens and my photographic infancy, so mostly Kodacolour Gold, 100ASA and 400ASA - which considering that this was the late 1980s/early 1990s and I was pushing the camera to its limits in poor light, didn't do wonders for any hope of producing grain-free pictures (when I wasn't so pushing it, it worked great). I was a high-ASA junkie, so my main frustration was that it wouldn't take anything faster than 400. I didn't have access to the manual (the camera was as old as I was by the time I started shooting with it), and my brief early flirtation with the school camera club when I was eleven or so brought only disdain from my teacher and colleagues as it didn't have full manual control or manual focus (focus-free with hyperfocal distance 1.5m to infinity), and I didn't have the nerve to ask my parents for a camera that had those things.

The one time I attempted to "go manual", I assumed a flash speed of 1/60 (I had somewhere absorbed the lore that this was what all good cameras shot flash at) and asked someone nearby (who just happened to be holding a K1000, thereby planting the Pentax seed) for an aperture value (at the appropriate ASA). She gave it to me and I took the shot. Of course it worked out well because I had an extra half-stop of exposure up my sleeve (real shutter speed 1/40, close enough to 1/45 to make no difference), but I wish I had known about Sunny 16 etc. Even then, in daylight it would have been absolutely useless because I couldn't force the shutter speed of 1/200 manually and 1/40 was far too slow for 400ASA film even with f/22 selected*, but it might have been OK in shade.

(* Round up to 1/50, then 1/100 = 1 stop, 1/200 = 2 stops, 1/400 = 3 stops... that's f/44 needed to get a proper 400ASA exposure in bright sunlight and I didn't have tighter than f/22. Then again, 400ASA was still pretty fast for everyday films when this came out, and 99% of casual users were probably shooting Kodachrome 64 for slides or 100ASA at most for colour prints. Chances are the average Kodachrome 64 user could have shot on Sunny 16 with no recalculations required and the extra fraction of a stop involved would not have done even slide film much harm.)

Last edited by pathdoc; 05-19-2017 at 12:23 PM.
10-05-2017, 09:41 AM - 1 Like   #7
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As I mentioned in the first post of this club thread, the medical/scientific K-mount Pentax half-frame camera is quite rare and it's difficult to find out much about it. Not many people seem to have adapted them to general photography, or, if they have, they've been rather closed mouthed about it! And the very few regular Pentax slrs that have been modified by a camera technician to shoot half-frame, are even more rare. There are really only two other ways to be half-way Pentaxian and shoot half-frame 35mm, and those are to use either a half-frame Olympus Pen interchangeable lens body (with m42 adapter) or a Konica Auto-Reflex Full-Frame/Half-Frame slr (with m42 adapter). Either case offers the possibility of using Pentax screw mount lenses, or other m42 screw mount lenses we may love, to shoot half-frame 35mm exposures.

When I introduced this club thread, I owned a broken copy of one of those switchable Konica bodies -- literally broken, as a piece of metal fell out of it when I took the bottom plate off. Now I have a mostly worn out, but still usually working copy. It's shutter has been locked up, but is free now. Often the film-advance-shutter-cocking lever has to be nudged a second time for the shutter to fire, but currently that procedure continues to work. Also as I recently finished a roll of film, I discovered that the advance spool still binds after the rewind release button is pressed in. But, the body is working, and lets me illustrated this method of half-way-Pentaxian half-frame 35mm shooting.

The (1965) Konica Auto-Reflex looks fairly similar to a lot of other early 35mm interchangeable lens slrs from the front. Here it is with my Super-Takumar f/1.8 55mm lens and the "Konica Praktica Lens Adapter 2 AR" necessary for using m42 lenses manually on Konica AR-mount camera bodies:



What makes the Auto-Reflex (and meterless Auto-Reflex P) different from other slrs--including all of Konica's other slrs-- is the little switch on the top, just right of the prism housing. The switch permits switching the camera between full-frame and half-frame formats, even mid-roll if needed. The bottom of the original camera case includes a durable little placard reminding one whether to wind the film advance before or after switching the frame switch. Not to follow it's directions will result in either large gaps between exposures or overlapping frames. Proper use of the switch could permit switching back and forth between formats as many times as one wanted during a single roll of film, but doing so willy-nilly has been said to be a good way of incurring the wrath of the person making prints (or today scans) from your negatives, as this poor fellow would have to repeatedly change negative masks. Flipping to half-frame in order to squeeze a few more exposures onto the last roll of film one had might be a more reasonable use of the switch mid-roll.



Flipping the switch from full-frame to half-frame slides what look like two little black pocket doors across part of the full-frame opening from each side, until the vertical half-frame rectangle is achieved. It is important to note that no such masking doors close over the sides of the viewfinder frame! The viewfinder frame includes two vertical guidelines marking the boundaries of the half-frame image, but the user must remember when framing pictures where he or she has the frame size switch set.



Because the half-frame masking doors are farther from the film plane than the full-frame mask, the vertical edges of the half-frame images are slightly fuzzy, more fuzzy than would be seen on negatives from cameras that are full-time half-frame. You can see this on this 2-up scan:




= = =

Now for a few examples from this first Takumar + Konica roll. Film used was Kodak 100Tmax. Scans were by Old School Photo. There is a bit of digital tweaking by me in the interest of maximizing shadow and/or highlight detail.













---

One of the hazards of shooting half-frame 35mm, as has been mentioned by participants in this thread already, is the enhancement of film grain in the enlarged prints or screen images. If one isn't bothered much by grain, it may be no problem whatsoever. I found that most, if not all, of these 100 Tmax images showed very little grain, so using a very fine-grain film might be preferred by photographers who don't like grain when first venturing into half-frame 35mm. Also, I was fortunate that the 100 Tmax emulsion must be very tough, and didn't get scratched by the force placed on it rewinding the film, caused by the binding spool in my particular copy of this Konica body. On the other hand, I wish that the Tmax had a bit more exposure latitude and held more shadow and highlight detail. I hadn't recalled it being so contrasty and touchy based on my previous use a year or two ago.


.


Last edited by goatsNdonkey; 10-05-2017 at 11:56 AM.
10-05-2017, 12:34 PM   #8
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I have an Olympus Pen FT half frame SLR it still works but unfortunately with just its standard 38mm lens, I had not actually thought of using M42 lenses on it, I shall have to look for an adapter.

Half frame is 18 x 24mm and the sensor in my K70 is 23.5 x 15.6mm which in a way is half frame when compared to a Full Frame 24 x 36mm DSLR so it could be said that us APS-C users are now shooting half frame.

The problem I ran into with half frame film was that either the processing lab ignored the fact that it was half frame and cut it into strips badly, refused to print it because their machinery was not set up for it or charged extra because of having to realign their equipment which kind of knocked the 72 off a 36 roll saving on the head.

I had always thought that it was Olympus who was first to introduce the format but I recently discovered a lovely little half frame interchangeable lens rangefinder by Ducati, the motorcycle firm, designed before WWII, didn't go into production until after the war though, and its way out of my financial league now.

There were at least 2 half frame models by Ricoh, a couple of motorised ones by Canon and I think Yashica and at least one from Taron but I don't think Nikon ventured into the fray.

I suppose its into another bracket and off the subject but the Tessina, a really beautiful piece of Swiss engineering, was a twin lens reflex which could be worn on your wrist and took 15 14 x 21mm shots on standard 35mm film in a special cassette.

CD
10-05-2017, 01:04 PM   #9
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In the past year, I saw a Pen half-frame slr on ebay that had the m42 lens adapter with it! Unfortunately, its auction price zoomed out of reach for me.

I had not heard of the Ducati branded interchangeable lens half-frame camera.

Yes, half-frame 35mm is kind of like the precursor to the cropped sensor, since the sizes are rather similar. The major difference, besides one being film and the other digital, is that the half-frame 35mm frame is vertical ("portrait" orientation as computer lingo calls it), while the APS-C frame is horizontal (aka "landscape" orientation). Half-frame 35mm cameras might lead to a person taking more vertical pictures, but I regularly flip the camera sideways whenever I want to, regardless of format.

Dwayne's Photo in Kansas will scan Half-frame 35mm for an additional $5 per roll, but it's not listed on their order blank. Their website says their standard scans are about 4.5 megapixel, but they must have upgraded their equipment, since they send me about 8 megapixel scans of full-frame. Their half-frame 35mm scans are about 4 megapixel. Also, Old School Photo, in New Hampshire (I believe it is), don't charge extra for half-frame scanning because they scan the roll as full-frame, in other words the images come to you scanned in pairs, or two-up, and you get to separate them in post processing. THAT'S WHAT THEY TOLD ME, but when I got my scans I received a folder of 24 2-up scans and a folder of 48 individual scans (or separated scans). They must have done that because I decided for once to pay for their enhanced scans, rather than their standard 6 megapixel scans. I believe it was only about $7 more. The full-frame 2-up images are 30 mpx and the half-frame images are about 14 mpx! For the regular service, Old School is more expensive than Dwaynes, but not nearly as high as some other processors. Those are the only places I happen to know about who welcome and do a reasonable job with half-frame developing and scanning. Other's who rely of paying for processing may know of others.

Do post more information or links about some of the other half-frame cameras you mentioned!


QuoteOriginally posted by PenPusher Quote
I have an Olympus Pen FT half frame SLR it still works but unfortunately with just its standard 38mm lens, I had not actually thought of using M42 lenses on it, I shall have to look for an adapter.

Half frame is 18 x 24mm and the sensor in my K70 is 23.5 x 15.6mm which in a way is half frame when compared to a Full Frame 24 x 36mm DSLR so it could be said that us APS-C users are now shooting half frame.

The problem I ran into with half frame film was that either the processing lab ignored the fact that it was half frame and cut it into strips badly, refused to print it because their machinery was not set up for it or charged extra because of having to realign their equipment which kind of knocked the 72 off a 36 roll saving on the head.

I had always thought that it was Olympus who was first to introduce the format but I recently discovered a lovely little half frame interchangeable lens rangefinder by Ducati, the motorcycle firm, designed before WWII, didn't go into production until after the war though, and its way out of my financial league now.

There were at least 2 half frame models by Ricoh, a couple of motorised ones by Canon and I think Yashica and at least one from Taron but I don't think Nikon ventured into the fray.

I suppose its into another bracket and off the subject but the Tessina, a really beautiful piece of Swiss engineering, was a twin lens reflex which could be worn on your wrist and took 15 14 x 21mm shots on standard 35mm film in a special cassette.

CD
10-05-2017, 01:41 PM - 1 Like   #10
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Stephen Gandy over at cameraquest.com has a great writeup about the Ducati's apparently there were 5 models not sure if they were all half frame.

Leica was on the point of making a half frame Leicaflex, only one was ever made and by the time they got around to it the half frame craze had ended and they shelved the project.

The Yashica Rapide and the Taron Chick were sort of mobile phone shaped so you did not have to flip them around to get the landscape format.

Ricoh made the Caddy and one called the Auto-Half which also came in Gold, well gold colour anyway.

Konica, Minolta, Fuji, Petri all made models as well. I was wrong about Nikon though they did have a version of their Contax based rangefinder for called the S72 I think and they did supply some modified SLRs as a special order.

Over at Half Format 18x24 cameras (1) there is a complete list of 135 half frame 18 x 24mm cameras, though some of them like Leica's and Exakta's were special adaptions of existing cameras for specific purposes. That's an awful lot more than I thought there was, the list covers several pages and you have to watch for a rotating NEXT sign at the bottom of the page to move onto the next batch.

There were also quite a few like the Robot range made in the 24 x 24mm format as well, some of them clockwork motorised.

By the look of things you could spend a lifetime trying to round them all up.

CD
10-05-2017, 02:24 PM   #11
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PenPusher -- that list you linked is much more comprehensive than what I have run across. I began by searching half-frame on ebay, simply because I was interested in shooting half-frame 35mm. Each type I found on ebay I would research. That lead to some webpages with information about more and more varieties of half-frame 35mm cameras, but the pages I found that listed many half-frame models by different makers didn't cover all of those!

It could be that a page I found linked to just one page of that link, to provide more detail about a particular camera maker's models, but I didn't realize how long the total list was on that website!






.

Last edited by goatsNdonkey; 10-06-2017 at 06:49 AM.
10-05-2017, 02:53 PM   #12
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There used to be a little magazine, late 1950's early 1960's, called 35mm Photography of which I was an avid reader, as well as standard 35mm it had sections for Half Frame and Sub-Miniature photography from which I picked up a lot of information, probably pretty useless now but it was very interesting at the time. It had discussions on Beutler's developing formulas as well of others of course. I think it had a colour photo on the front cover but apart from that it was all black and white.

In the 60's I was a reader of Leica Fotographie most of the illustrations at that time were in black and white and it had a section on "Masters of the Leica" contributed by some well known, at the time, photographers which I suppose influenced me, and I managed to pick up quite a lot of information, its completely different now and I would not be bothered with it. I always used SLR's and never had a Leica until I recently purchased one of the old screw mount models, way nicer than the M series, it sits in your hands beautifully. I seem to be going back to the future and am presently fitting out my shed so I can resume developing film after maybe 20 or probably more years, I think I will give enlarging a miss though and scan in the negatives.

CD
10-06-2017, 01:42 AM   #13
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In 1965 I was working in the City of London, thats the original part of London within the old city wall long gone, this is from Wallace Heaton's 1965 catalogue, according to the Bank of England's Inflation calculator £1 in 1965 is the Equivalent of £17.77 in today's money as of 10 minutes ago $1 = £0.75914 say $0.76, at that time the currency was £sd Pounds shillings and pence where £1 = 20 shillings and 1 shilling = 12 pence- penny and 1 penny had 4 farthings - try doing accounts that way, it drove you crazy. At the time I was earning around £12 a week = £ 213 in todays money = about $162 which kind of explains why you did not buy much film.
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10-06-2017, 06:58 AM   #14
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QuoteOriginally posted by PenPusher Quote
In 1965 I was working in the City of London, thats the original part of London within the old city wall long gone, this is from Wallace Heaton's 1965 catalogue, according to the Bank of England's Inflation calculator £1 in 1965 is the Equivalent of £17.77 in today's money as of 10 minutes ago $1 = £0.75914 say $0.76, at that time the currency was £sd Pounds shillings and pence where £1 = 20 shillings and 1 shilling = 12 pence- penny and 1 penny had 4 farthings - try doing accounts that way, it drove you crazy. At the time I was earning around £12 a week = £ 213 in todays money = about $162 which kind of explains why you did not buy much film.

The old catalog pages are fun to look at. My next posting of half-frame pictures will be with examples from a Fujica Half, which is listed there. When the auto-aperture mechanism on my little Pen half-frame (photos from it posted earlier in this thread) stuck again, no longer responding to attempts to get it working right again, I found a good price on the Fujica. I just have to finish shooting the last frames -- half-frame rolls are long! I should have finished the roll in June, but somehow I got out of the film shooting habit for part of the summer and have just been getting back to it lately.




.
10-06-2017, 08:49 AM   #15
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QuoteOriginally posted by goatsNdonkey Quote
The old catalog pages are fun to look at. My next posting of half-frame pictures will be with examples from a Fujica Half, which is listed there. When the auto-aperture mechanism on my little Pen half-frame (photos from it posted earlier in this thread) stuck again, no longer responding to attempts to get it working right again, I found a good price on the Fujica. I just have to finish shooting the last frames -- half-frame rolls are long! I should have finished the roll in June, but somehow I got out of the film shooting habit for part of the summer and have just been getting back to it lately.




.
I got over the problem of long rolls by buying bulk, a Watson Daylight loader and loading up my recycled cassettes with 12(24) and 24(48) shot lengths, you just have to be very careful that the fur around the cassette mouth does not pick up any dust or grit and leave a scratch on the film. Half frame cameras are very pocket friendly, I think their death knell was sounded by the Rollei 35 series which managed to cram a full frame camera into a not much bigger body Where you run into problems is if your label becomes detached and you start wondering exactly what film and how many shots you have. Reminds me off the food manufacturer who used to allow his employees to take home tins from which the label had become detached, you were never exactly sure of the dinner menu.

There seems to be some kind of film revival taking place, my local on-line supplier is currently offering 20 different B&W types in 36 exp and 18 in 120 medium format plus a selection of 4 x 5 sheet film as well as 7 36 exp colour negative and 6 120 colour negative films. Not bad for a small outfit in a very small country.

I shall have to get a new battery for my Olympus FT and load it with a short roll of film.

CD
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