half frame
Here’s a selection of film photos I shot over the winter & early spring. Half-frame 35mm on Pen FT camera, with a few different films (mostly AristaEDU 400 and Tri-X 400). These are in more-or-less chronological order. As usual, I’m still developing and scanning these rolls myself.
I got a working half-frame camera in November so the bad news for you, dear reader, is that I can now shoot twice as many photos on a roll and will be taking even more photos than I have been. I got an Olympus Pen FT, and it’s been really nice to shoot with in general.
By the way, other than being able to take twice as many photos, the draw of the half-frame camera for me is that, since each image is smaller on the roll of film, the grain is much more pronounced in each image. In fact, it’s twice as large as it would appear in a normal full-frame 35mm image.
I love the gritty look of these images that comes as a result of this larger grain, and I love how the process of reflected light being recorded onto a film strip can distort reality. It’s more a process of mark-making than of capturing real objects and scenes. Film photography in general has this appeal for me, and black-and-white film is already great at abstracting reality. But the smaller images with larger grain that the half-frame camera produces add yet another layer of distortion between the real thing and how it’s expressed in the final image. These images feel even more dreamlike to me, they have the quality of a moment half-remembered. And rather than simply being a still moment in time, these images make it look as though the world itself held still and posed.
Some half-frame photos from a roll I shot in Portland in early July 2020.
More photos shot on my half-frame film camera, from late April and early May 2020.
The control over the focus and aperture is pretty limited with this camera, so I still don’t fully know what to expect when I shoot with it. Lots of pics were too out-of-focus or over-exposed, but I like how many of them turned out. The out-of-focus and blown-out quality of the pics from this camera is really interesting. I love how this quality makes the pictures look like they’re from another time, or a dream. It calls to mind a different world when I look at them, and I like taking pics of stuff just to see how it’ll look filtered through this camera. It’s making me notice things I hadn’t before, even when I’m not taking any pictures.
I recently got a half-frame 35mm camera, an Olympus Pen EE-S. It only exposes half of the normal 35mm frame at a time, so I can get twice the photos out of a roll of film than I can with a normal camera (and each image is half normal size). These are photos from the first roll I shot to test it out, with Fuji Xtra 200 film. Most of them turned out way over-exposed, but I like a bunch of them. Looking forward to figuring this camera out more.
