Friday 3 October 2014

olympus trip 35


I have got interested in shooting some film again and recently picked up this lovely olympus trip 35 for not very much off ebay. They are glorious little machines, beautifully built and are notable in that they are almost totally mechanical and battery less. The only concession to electricity is they have a selenium element on the end of the lens.. (early photovoltaic/solar panel) which sends current to a little coil which sets a pin that mechanically connects to the aperture to correctly adjust the aperture diameter for the exposure...if there's not enough light it pushes a red bar up in the viewfinder and refuses to fire the shutter.. such an elegant system.

Mine however had the common stuck aperture syndrome that lots of these have so I had to completely strip down the lens and rebuild which was entertaining (my best tip is to mark a line on the body and then mark every piece you remove lined up with the body mark so you can rebuild the lens with everything in the right place!!) There's some good instructions/advice about stripping down the trip 35 here.

So here are some shots from the first reel of film I chucked through it with no post tweaking at all..(poundland agfa vista iso200 film if your interested!) I am pretty pleased with them...(double click to view larger)




A small tag in bangor


One of my most favourite walls..

bulb


This last shot is of a collaborative piece of artwork I did with Morgan Griffith... a blog post about this will occur soon!