Fujica ST701: Birthing Scandal Pond-Pool

Ninety million years ago I had fun with some pre-flashed film, and although the Fujica ST605 that I used back then is long-gone I still have some M42 lenses. By chance a Fujica ST701 fell into my hands, so I decided to try it out.

Despite the number, the ST701 was actually the ST605's predecessor. Its posher, smaller, generally more sophisticated predecessor. The specification was typical of the period - top speed 1/1000th, uncoupled electronic TTL metering, manual everything - but the body was smaller than the competition and the meter was apparently more accurate. Alas for Fuji it was launched shortly before the Olympus OM, which was even smaller and smarter. On the whole Fuji's film SLRs didn't leave much of a mark, and nobody remembers them nowadays. They were, I imagine, tangential to the company's film business (the firm's digital SLRs, on the other hand, were frustratingly brilliant).

Unfortunately the ST701 uses long-discontinued mercury batteries, so I had to use a hand-held meter, which was a bother. The camera itself is all-manual, and the battery only powers the meter. Fujica's standard lens was a 55mm f/1.8, slightly narrower than the typical 50mm.

I also used a Unitor 28mm f/2.8 which I got for nothing. It's so soft in the corners at f/2.8 that it's almost endearing. I can't fault it for the massive vignetting - I used a polarising filter - but as a full-frame lens it was worth every penny I paid for it:

Here's what it looks like:

On the positive side the lens looks lovely, with a distinctively blue cast to the coating, and it's built solidly out of metal. The weight is such that if you wanted to drown your neighbour's pet tortoise for your own sexual gratification you could use it to weigh the bag down. Imagine a tortoise slowly drowning, kicking its legs futility as it sinks to the bottom of Hampstead Heath's ladies' pond; imagine tying its legs together or encasing it in a plastic bag so that it can't move. Imagine that. The things you find in the darker corners of LiveLeak.

It's Japanese, the lens is Japanese. It was also sold under the Uni, Photax-Paragon, Revue, Pentor, and Eyemik(!) names. It seems to have originally been built by a company called Mitake, which crumbled to dust long ago.

My ST701 has rusty spots and the light seals had fallen apart, and I don't trust the 1s setting, but otherwise it works just as it did in 1971. In 2015 ancient M42 match-needle SLRs are essentially junk, doubly so in ST701's case unless you happen to be a rabid Fuji collector. The 55mm f/1.8 standard lens is lovely but has a boring specification. Here's what it looks like:

I can't stop thinking about that tortoise. They don't feel pain; they're basically vegetables. Here's how the lens performs versus a modern Canon 50mm f/1.4, which is faster and just slightly wider. It's not really a fair comparison, because f/1.8 is wide open for the Fuji lens, stopped-down for the Canon, but life isn't fair. Life is in fact cruel. Large animals eat smaller animals; adult bears and hippos and rats kill their children whenever the watering hole becomes too crowded, and human beings are essentially animals.

In the middle of the frame the two lenses are soft but usable one stop down, reaching a peak at f/5.6, with the Canon lens generally better overall:

Fujinon 55mm f/1.8 at f/1.8, f/2.8, f/5.6, f/8

Canon 50mm f/1.4 EF at f/1.8, f/2.8, f/5.6, f/8

In the corner the Fuji lens isn't great at f/1.8 or f/2.8, but jumps up a notch at f/5.6 and essentially becomes sharp across the frame at that aperture, notably without any CA:

Whereas the Canon lens - bought brand-new earlier this year - isn't quite as consistent (again, f/1.8, f/2.8, f/5.6, f/8):

If this little test demonstrates anything, it's that standard 50mm-55mm lens design hasn't progressed all that much in half a century. Over the last few years there has been a mini-explosion of posh fast 50mm lenses, but even nowadays the best and most expensive 50mm - the Zeiss Otus seems to be the modern benchmark - are only incrementally better than their distant predecessors.

What film did I use? It was some long-expired Boots 200-speed film that appears to be rebadged Fuji Superia, judging by the code on the negative. It was a nice sunny day.

Olympus OM-1

It used to be that people moved to the shining city on the hill, lived in squalor, did the work, saved up, and then bought houses and became the general population; but that's all broken. Now people live in squalor, do the work, work in squalor, never earn enough to save, never earn enough to leave a mark, live in squalor, die in squalor. Their bodies are thrown into a mass grave. Repeat.

An OM-1n (left) next to an OM-2n, its auto-exposure brother.

Just like New York. And New York still exists and is an economic powerhouse, and Rio de Janeiro still exists and has its favelas, which still exist, and if that model works why not London? Why not everywhere? For thirty years Belfast was a war zone of barricades and petrol bombs, but Britain survived; what does it matter if poor people kill each other? They breed, and some of them are good-looking.

And Detroit and Chicago, there are bubbles within bubbles. The counteracting force of gentrification simply pushes poverty off the edge of the page, where it becomes invisible. The inner-city slums become suburban slums, and then the wasteland, with the shining city on the hill not a beacon of hope but a meat grinder.

Today we're going to look at the Olympus OM-1, which was launched with great fanfare in 1972. It was Olympus' first heartfelt stab at making a conventional 35mm SLR, and was very influential in its day. On a conceptual level it was a bit like the first Half-Life game, in the sense that none of its elements were new, but everything had been stripped down and polished and redesigned and assembled with fresh ideas and modern materials.

Top late design genius Yoshihisa Maitani managed to squeeze a professional-level SLR into a body that was lighter and about half a centimetre smaller in all dimensions than competing designs, without compromising its functionality. This extended to the rest of the expansive OM system; the motor drives, flash units and particularly the lenses were all very compact. The OM-1 and its heirs sold well, and within a short time compact was in - the Pentax ME and Nikon EM followed a couple of years later. On a broader level the 1970s saw the SLR become a popular consumer gadget, and if the 1960s was the golden age of the posh SLR then the 1970s was the heyday of the SLR-as-Package Holiday-Accompaniment, with half of them bought by dads who imagined that one day they might be top fashion photographers.

The old Foyles has now become a tat bazaar / sushi bar / laser tag arena (!) called O YES, which is both a clever reuse of the original sign and utterly naff. On the positive side, the new Foyles (just up the road) is fantastic, but it's now surrounded by boarded-up shops, and what future is there for a big prestige physical bookshop on Charing Cross road? Since when did it make sense to put a bookshop in the middle of London? The city's residents are split between people who don't read books and people who don't go to shops or read books.

I was originally exposed to the OM system via its lenses, which are tiny and can be adapted to work with modern digital cameras; I picked up an OM-2 and liked it, but I was always curious about the OM-1. The OM-2 has aperture-priority autoexposure and requires batteries to work, whereas the OM-1 is mechanical and only requires batteries for the built-in light meter, which drives an indicator needle in the viewfinder. The needle is perhaps the camera's only flaw; it's a bit too small to see easily in dim light, and this being 1972 it's not illuminated. Having said that the viewfinder is enormous and (again, this is 1972) unencumbered by readouts of any kind. It doesn't matter what you wear, just so long as you are there.

The OM-1 was sold from 1972 right up until the mid-late 1980s, although there were different models, each one more advanced than the last. The first OM-1 was actually the Olympus M-1, but after a complaint from Leica Olympus changed the name. There is some debate as to how many M-1s were sold, with estimates extended into the tens of thousands based on the serial numbers of surviving units. This fan site has lots of images of lens boxes and the like, which reveal that the M-1 was part of the M-System. It must have been a bother having to redesign everything. The system's logotype was originally a slanted-forward M. The OM system dropped the slant, perhaps because the letter O looks odd when it's slanted. OOOOOOOOOOOO, see what I mean?

The M-1 brochure has an addendum pointing out that the system's name will be changed for trademark reasons, so the change must have been unexpected and sudden. The brochure also lists an impressive range of lenses:

On the whole the OM lens range didn't expand all that much over its production run; it seemed to stagnate in the 1980s. The original OM-1 was replaced in 1974 by a new OM-1, unofficially known as the OM-1MD although never badged as such, which could accept motor drives. The MD was replaced in 1978 by the OM-1n, which added a flash ready light in the viewfinder (mine is very faint, but still works) and a modified wind lever.

As far as I can tell there's no reason other than nostalgia to buy one of the pre-1n models. The 1n was discontinued in the mid-late 1980s. Most sources say 1987, but my hunch is that Olympus gave up on it in the middle of the decade in favour of the OM-4, and sales beyond 1985 or so were just a trickle from Olympus' stockpile. Judging by Google Books' archive of old magazines, the price had fallen to budget level by 1985. I was only a kid at the time, but I imagine that the OM-1 would have felt a bit naff in the late 1980s.

The OM-1 was very fresh and new in the 1970s; Olympus' adverts big it up as a state-of-the-art SLR embodying the latest technology in electronics, metallurgy and optics. It lived long enough to become a modern classic, and ironically Olympus' print adverts of the 1980s tout its conservatism:

It's a camera, not a computer made of metal, not plastic. Olympus struggled with its SLR range in the 1980s. The OM-3 was an improved OM-1n that nonetheless felt superfluous and was discontinued quickly, before being revived with an expensive titanium body in the 1990s; the OM-4 was an improved OM-2 with a clever multi-spot metering system that must have been difficult for camera shop employees to sell. The company's attempts to sell a plastic, autofocus SLR were half-hearted, and eventually Olympus concentrated on the compact market instead. It's often said in marketing circles that you should sell benefits, not features, and Olympus seems to have a problem with this; the Four-Thirds system was sold as the first-ever native digital SLR system that was a marvel of modern technology, but the cameras were initially no smaller than the competition and did nothing better.

My OM-1n must be around thirty years old, and has a patina, but the shutter still fires with a reassuringly dampened cuh-chunk sound. The adverts also tout the camera's ruggedness, although as far as I can tell Olympus never seriously attempted to take on Nikon for the professional photojournalist market. There were a couple of fast telephotos - including a 250mm f/2.0 which still sounds impressive nowadays - but otherwise the company seemed to be content with the macro / scientific market. Olympus also sells medical equipment, and there was an extensive range of OM macro bellows and lenses.

For the images in this post I used a Vivitar 28-85mm f/2.8-3.8, which is bigger than the camera and large enough to act as its own carrying handle.

It's the year of the sheep. We're going to be sick of "you're all sheeple" by the end of the year. Yeah, and what if the sheeple DO rise, and we don't like it?

I mean, the Daily Mail is the best-selling newspaper and most popular news website in the UK. *They* outnumber *you*, isn't it likely that a popular revolution would sweep *them* into power?
That's why democracy doesn't work, and that's why you don't have it.

And also why you can't be trusted with scissors. Physically the lens is awkward. It's one of Vivitar's auto variable focusing designs, built by Kiron in Japan. You grab the barrel and pull back to zoom out, push forward to zoom in, twist to focus, and as you focus it zooms a little bit, and as you zoom the focus changes, and ultimately it's a bit like flying a helicopter or playing the bagpipes, you have to use all of your limbs plus your mouth.

As far as I know it's a late 1970s / early 1980s design, unusually fast and wide for the period. It focuses very closely at 28mm and throughout the range until 85mm, at which point the minimum focus distance abruptly goes up a few feet; there's noticeable barrel distortion at the wider end and some obvious vignetting, but otherwise I don't have a problem with it. I use it as a 28mm that zooms in a bit.

On the negative side, it turns the compact OM-1 into a large, heavy lump. On the positive side, Olympus never made a lens with the same specification - the company concentrated on primes instead - but on the negative side again I could probably have got by with a 28mm f/2.8 and some footwork and a piano and some drugs.

It's London Fashion Week. There it is, right there. Somerset House had a crowd of youths with cameras near the entrance. My hunch is that when an attractive lady comes along, they jump out and say that they're the official photographer; their goal is to get her number and put her into an environment where it's easier and less painful to just get naked than resist.

Eventually you come to despise the poor and the weak. They can't be bothered to help themselves, let them perish.

Film-wise I used HP5 and TMAX 400. Which is which? Cast your eyes over the images in this post; the grey images are HP5, the black images are TMAX. The meter was accurate enough for them. The OM uses long-discontinued PX mercury cells, but luckily I have an adapter that lets me use modern batteries. The meter needle goes snick-snick-snick instead of waving about.

Did I like the OM-1? I think I was spoiled by the OM-2, which is physically almost identical but has autoexposure. The OM-1's only real advantage is that it will work without electricity, but in 2014 the chances of me being without electricity are very small.

The OM-1 also has a mirror lock up, but again in 2014 the chances of me using the camera for astronomy or macro photography are very small. The problem is that if I have to grab a 35mm film SLR, why not the OM-2?

The OM-1 has essentially just one usability quirk. The shutter speed dial goes around the lens mount, shown here on an OM-2:

Nikon used this idea in the Nikkormat FT of 1965, but gave up on it thereafter. The OM-1's implementation is much better - the OM system puts the aperture ring at the end of the lens, away from the body - but it's a shame the two finger-grabs aren't larger. If they were a little bit bigger and projected further forwards the camera would be easier to use; in practice I left it at 1/125 and changed the aperture instead.

Electronics-wise the OM-2 supports automatic flash whereas the OM-1 doesn't, but again I doubt I'll ever use the OM's flash system except to test that it works. The OM-1 seems to have had no design faults or reliability issues (later OMs had electrical gremlins).

It's good that Facebook has billboard advertisements. I might never have heard of them otherwise. Also, friends are useful. Are we on the verge of something? And if so, what?

Pre-Flashing: I Got Poetry In Me

As one thing dies another thing is born. With Firefox 23 the blink tag was finally laid to rest, and now if you want to make text flash on and off you have to use animated gifs or HTML5 or Javascript or something. The simple elegance of the blink tag is no more. Is this progress?

So in tribute I decided to have a go at flashing. No, not that kind of flashing. Or the other kind. I'm talking about a venerable photographic technique. It's quite popular with large format photographers and zone systems aficionados, but is otherwise obscure, and of no real relevance in the digital age. In that respect it is like love and food; in an age of virtual machines and always-on internet we no longer need them. A few cranks do it the old-fashioned way.

It's also called pre-flashing or pre-exposure but the idea is the same. You take your film and expose it to a small amount of light, and then you shoot it as per usual. If you use ordinary white light flashing has the effect of boosting the shadows and reducing contrast, as if you were fiddling with the highlight / shadow controls in Photoshop. If you use coloured light, it does this as well, but it also mucks the colours around. So I used coloured light. Two effects for the price of one.

Blue in this case. I flashed the film blue. Fuji Superia Xtra 400. It had the effect of muting blues in the image and making everything a bit green once it had been inverted. It also made the film yellow:

Flashing with red light makes the film green, by the way (and has the effect of desaturating reds):

Preflashing sheet film is relatively simple, because you can leave the film in place when you pre-flash and expose. Preflashing 35mm is harder. You can't simply flash a roll and then rewind and feed it back into the camera, because the frames won't be lined up. You could in theory use your camera's multiple exposure feature, if it has one, but ensuring consistent pre-flashing is difficult. I used the most direct solution I could think of - I unrolled some film in a dark room, taped it to the wall, and popped off a flashgun through a coloured gel at a low intensity. The results are imprecise, just like life.

Camera-wise I used a Fujica ST605 with a Chinon 55mm f/1.4, shooting through a vaseline-smeared filter. The ST605 is a late-period M42 body with stop-down match needle metering, notable mainly for using standard SR44 batteries rather than unobtainable mercury cells.

It's no more advanced than a Pentax Spotmatic of ten years earlier, and has some of the same ergonomic flaws, e.g. you can't easily change the shutter speed without taking the camera away from your face and there's no film reminder window. The plastic tip of the wind lever is hinged, but it just feels broken. The top shutter speed is an odd 1/700. If I had been in charge of Fujica I would have labelled it as 1/1000, because the target audience isn't going to notice, and it would be embarassing to sell a camera that was less advanced than a ten-year-old Pentax SP1000.

Still, the ST605 is compact and really, really cheap. By 1976 the M42 system was on the way out, although Chinon had a go at bringing it into the modern age with the Memotron, which had aperture-priority autoexposure and LED exposure indicators. Zenit and Praktica continued to sell M42 bodies for many years afterwards, but - like hippies and compassion - they were anachronisms by the 1980s.

Preflashing was one of the many weapons of the Hollywood cinematographer, back when films were shot with film. I have always associated it with the 1970s, a decade when a small number of cinematographers were given enough freedom to mess about with thousands, nay millions of dollars worth of film stock. It's absurd to talk about the "look" of an entire decade, but when I think of Hollywood in the 1970s I think of a low-contrast, low-saturation aesthetic - scuzzier than studio productions of the 1950s and 1960s, less saturated than the neon colours of the 1980s, with copious amounts of lens flare (e.g. Close Encounters of the Third Kind, for which Vilmos Zsigmond won an Academy Award) and diffusion filters, the hallmark of Geoffrey Unsworth. Flashing was used by Owen Roizman for the dimly-lit Taking of Pelham One Two Three and, more famously, by Zsigmond for Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs Miller, which was shot in dim light with slow zoom lenses, fog filters, 50-speed film, probably spiders in the camera. Flashing is especially demanding with film stock, because the flasher has to ensure consistent results across different reels.

McCabe is the ultimate Hipster Western. It was filmed in Canada, for a start. It has songs by Leonard Cohen. The characters dress up like Mumford and Sons. And (spoiler) it has an unhappy ending. Unhappy endings were a cliché of New Hollywood; One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Dog Day Afternoon, The French Connection, Chinatown and so forth all ended with death and failure and bleak, bleak emptiness. McCabe is particularly bitter, in that McCabe takes on an impossible task and almost pulls it off. Perhaps he went on to be a legendary folk hero. Or, more likely, he was forgotten by history, and everything he achieved and all the people he cared for were scattered to the four winds. In New Hollywood it wasn't so much that the hero died at the end; the films existed in a world incompatible with heroism.

So the story goes,

Soon after Robert Altman released his "art film" hippie Western, McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), Stanley Kubrick called from London with a burning question, "How’d you get that shot where McCabe [Warren Beatty] is lighting the cigar?" The shot - just a blink during the opening credits - is a tone poem: a distant point of flame against a black figure on a rope bridge in a pastel forest.

"Well, we just kind of waited till the end of the day [for the right light]," said Altman, who took the filtered telephoto shot through a pane of saloon glass. Incredulous that it was done simply by "feel," the precision-minded Kubrick pressed for specifics. "Yea, but after you shot it, how’d you know it was good?"

"Well, we didn’t."

Robert Altman is remembered more as a people-and-dialogue director than a visual stylist, which is a shame because his films were always interesting to look at. That shot, mentioned above:

The grain and low contrast defy digital compression, they mock it. The rest of the film has a distinctive look that reeks of the 1970s; if you could distil it into a set of Final Cut or After Effects presets you could charge money for it. About the only thing that doesn't work is the fake snow during the final gunfight, which was added as an optical effect and always seems to be floating in front of the image. Apart from that the film is, in its own way, perfect. Riddled with imperfections. But perfect.

You learn to hate that little bastard. Also, this is where I got my visual sense from; films, not photography.