Interesting Camera Review: Olympus Trip 35

Pictured here is the Olympus Trip 35, which was produced from 1967 to 1984. It is a 35 mm point and shoot and was designed as a sort of photographic travel notebook, hence the name. It has a nice Olympus Zuiko 40mm f/2.8. In spite of it's looks and simplicity, this is a real camera with a glass lens and a metal body, not some plastic lens hipster toy. It's a lovely camera and has developed a cult following. It's easy to find sites which cater to Trip 35 fans that sell accessories such as custom leather or leatherette covers, flashes, new light seals, lens caps, etc. Check out http://www.tripman.co.uk/

The metering is quite clever. Light is gathered by the selenium cells surrounding the lens. This meters the light and creates just enough charge for a very simple elecromechanical exposure system that uses, and to send a signal to the flash shoe. Depending on the light measured, the camera switches between just two shutter speeds, and then picks the aperture. The camera uses no batteries. If there is not enough light to take a photo, the shutter will not trip and a little red flag pops up in the viewfinder. The aperture stops on the ring are used for flash calculation. For normal daylight shooting you keep it set on "A". You can still set the ring to an aperture to fool the camera into thinking that it has a flash attached to make fun nighttime street photos and cityscapes. The focusing is just a four-setting range-focus system. For close-up portraiture, you have to look out for the parallax between the lens and what you are looking at through the viewfinder. Sometimes I forget to use the frame lines in the viewfinder and find that I have to do some cropping after I get my scans back.

The black camera I purchased at an estate sale for $5.00. The silver one came from eBay for about $30. I "steampunked" the Ebay camera slightly so I could shoot photos of people at these events while still being a fully costumed part of the action and not be "Mister Photographer Guy" with a bazooka-sized DSLR getting between me and full participation in the festivities. Some of my steampunk photos taken with the Trip are in the second post below this one.

I've been to a few of these cosplay type events. While some of the official "Mister Photographer Guys" have some truly outstanding work, others (that you see walking around in t-shirts and shorts with thousands of dollars worth of photo equipment), tend to just upload their entire SD cards without editing, so you see all the boringly composed shots and the ones washed out by too much fill flash. Film forces you to think. This is a brilliant little fun mechanical camera to take with you when you don't want to carry a full SLR.

The Trip 35 and the others that I will eventually show are cameras for the rest of us. I'm not a Professional Photographer. I don't make money off my work. Manytimes I'm off the mark, and I'm always willing to learn from someone willing to teach, but I believe that I have a pretty decent eye for composition. What I hope to show with these camera posts is that you don't need to schlep around fifty pounds of techno-wizbang equipment to make some decent photos for yourself, whether you do it for art's sake, or to just capture some memories.