One Bridewell Street.
Trip 35, Kodak RS200.
Esso, in the dark.
Petrol (gas) is now averaging 130p/litre in the UK. For you US folks, that’s about $7.70 a gallon. I enjoyed your $3-something a gallon prices in September last year, and the fact that the 3.7L, 305hp Mustang I hired was giving better ‘gas mileage’ than my 1.8L, 140hp MX-5!
Trip 35, Velvia 50.
Cameras: Point-and-click - Olympus Trip 35
The Olympus Trip 35. Everyone should have one. The upmarket LOMO in my view - nicely made, zone focus, fully auto but needs no battery and has a decent (glass) lens.
Let me repeat - needs no battery. If you mess about with old cameras much, you’ll know that this is a very good thing.
There’s possibly a bit of ‘scene tax’ on them at the moment, but for 10-20 quid a good one should be obtainable. Mine came from my grandmother, and cost me an hour or so to fix a sticking aperture. I don’t have a decent portrait of the Trip to hand, so here’s a family photo with a 35ECR and 35RC, more of which later.
All these 70s Olympus compacts are things of beauty and feel great to hold and use, even the cheap-as-chips Trip. As an engineer it’s easy to appreciate the simplicity of the Trip, with the remarkably good auto-exposure system powered entirely by the selenium light meter and consisting of very few parts. Here’s a shot taken with it, using Kodak Portra 160VC print film…
All (or at least most of) my Trip photos can be seen here. I don’t think they’re my best photos, and there are many people producing far better stuff with this camera (and many like it). I recommend for your perusal the Trip 35 flickr group, the awesome work of Tom Guilbert (not using a Trip, but an even crummier Vivitar ‘focus-free’ P+S) and this photo which I just love the look of.
I’ve got a lot I want to write at the moment, so I might employ the ‘queue’ function of tumblr to lessen the onslaught just a little…
