Camera Talk

I confess that I am a fan of the half-frame formats.

Any other users? At the top of the heap should be the Olympus Pen cameras. A guy at work had a complete outfit. I think he should have given it to me, but he never did. And now I've switched jobs.



My favorite is the Agfa Optima-Para, which has a very nice lens and a very slippery body that just begs to be dropped. I love the photos from it, and it's really simple to use.



A couple of years ago, I picked up an Ansco Memo -- the old, old camera. Its body is made of wood, and it just has that little Galilean tube viewfinder.

So I shot some film with it. Luckily, the camera had two cassettes, or I'd have to improvise. The photos were unusual. I thought maybe that I had reinstalled one of the elements backward, but it wasn't possible with this lens.

Unlike most cameras, the default orientation is landscape, because the film runs vertically. There were some better lenses offered for this, and most likely they would give you better photos than the non-focusing optic on this one.







I picked up an Ansco GAF (Made by Chinon) Memo II and have been playing around with it a big. I'll write about it once I finish the roll of film.

I'm a big fan of half-frame. I think what I like best is the native vertical format of half-frame.

I agree about the Olympus family -- my overall favourite is the Pen D3 of which I have had three over the years that I have been into that format. And I agree about the Agfa cameras -- for near-p&s ease and high quality, they cannot be beat in half-frame.

Here is a Flickr set of some of my half-frame shots:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/flipflik/ ... 077348167/

Philip

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I only have the one 35 mm half-frame, a FED Mikron. I love it; I love that the auto-exposure still works, and that it came with an f/1.9 lens. I've come (in the end) to find it amusing to find out what's on that long roll of pictures when I finally finish one. I like the aspect ratio of the picture; the same as 3x4 cm (half-frame 127, which I do as well), and the same as 4.5x6, which I suppose if 'half-frame 120'.

Here's my Mikron set, and here are a few from it that I like:


Fungus


Stacked barriers (same kind of picture, I guess)


Horse on Buslingthorpe Lane
I walked home from the University on a warm, wet spring day, and saw this poor old thing standing patiently in the rain, and the trees behind steaming like a tropical forest.


Beech in late summer, and mower bloke


Dusk (see what I mean about f/1.9; if you set the aperture manually, the camera defaults to 1/30, so you can take one last picture in the dusk).

I have 2 of them I think I will take one out tomorrow. It is am OLY. The other one is a toy camera called The Golden Half.

Dustin McAmera wrote:Here's my Mikron set, and here are a few from it that I like:

That Mikron is a good performer, Dustin. Seventy-two shots before taking a peek sure does require some discipline.
--- James

I have a Yashica Samurai X3.0 that I've gotten good results from.


Wooden Ducks by br1078phot, on Flickr

PF