Olympus Pen EE-3 with Lomography Color Negative

At the beginning of the year, I bought an Olympus Pen EE-3 to replace my broken Olympus Pen EE. I had been out with it once to test it and was glad that I have a functioning half-frame camera again. I tested it with black and white film which, no fault of the Kodak Tri-X, didn’t quite work well with the half-frame format. The side-by-side images looked too similar to each other.

I went out with it again early in the spring. Luckily, I had it with me the time the batteries died in my Canon EOS Rebel 2000.

Other than a few pictures that didn’t align correctly, I was pleased with the results.

I’m not sure what the problem was with those few photos, possibly an issue with advancing the film. Given that most of the roll turned out fine, and the first roll I shot didn’t evince this problem, I’m going to assume it was just some kind of fluke.

The other images from that walk turned out well. These pictures include our walk along the Schuylkill River as well as our walk home. The first picture includes one shot prior to that walk.

One of the potentially fun things about half-frame cameras is intentionally pairing certain images. However, it can be hard to know exactly when you take your first shot since loading can be a little tricky with some cameras, thus the well know “first of the roll” phenomenon, when the first shot is a partial exposure. This usually isn’t a problem in a standard camera (and can often yield interesting results) since that shot is often an extra shot (i.e. a 37th picture on a roll of 36). But with a half-frame camera, it can give an incorrect perception of what the first shot really is thus throwing off being able to know when you are pairing images.

One workaround is to take a number of shots of similar things in a series thereby ensuring at least some of the pictures will pair up.

I did this for taking pictures of doors:

And pictures of decorated utility boxes:

Over Easter weekend, Holly and I went on a walk along South Street where they were holding an Easter eggs hunt of sorts. Various stores had eggs made by different artists with the intention of having people walk around looking for all the eggs and take pictures. I brought along my Pen EE-3 with the intention of taking pictures only of the eggs to get most of them paired, but there were some other things along the way that I couldn’t resist taking pictures of. We actually didn’t find many of the eggs.

And here are a few more shots that didn’t fit in any of the above descriptions:

I hope as I grow more familiar with using the Olympus Pen EE-3, I’ll get a better sense of what my first photo is so I can do more intentional pairing of images. But it’s also fun sometimes to see how the pictures line up when I’m not paying any attention to their sequence. Either way, I’ve found shooting with half-frame cameras to be a fun experience.