Fujica Half: Demi-Siècle

Let's have a look at the Fujica Half, a half-frame camera from 1963. Back in the early 1960s there was a fad in Japan for half-frame cameras. It was sparked off by the 1959 Olympus Pen, which I wrote about back in 2013. Unlike other miniature film formats half-frame used standard 35mm film, but the frame was half-sized and turned on its side.

In theory the image quality should have been half as good as standard 35mm, but film has resolution to spare, and the 18x24mm frame size was more than enough for ordinary prints. It had twice the area of 110 and was, by coincidence, almost exactly the same size as the Super 35 motion picture film format that appeared in the 1980s. Half-frame is appealing nowadays because it scans easily, the resolution is more than enough for the internet, and it makes economical use of film.

Half-frame never took off in the West. The internet says that half-frame was killed off by the likes of Minox and Rollei, but I'm skeptical; a more likely explanation is that Kodak was wary of anything that might result in consumers buying less film, so instead of embracing or extending half-frame they developed the 126 Instamatic format as an attempt to extinguish it.

Kodak's business model in the late 20th century involved making people pay more money for less film, which meant making the film smaller and putting it in a plastic cartridge of non-standard size. Furthermore the world was a lot more parochial in those days, and Japanese products still had a stigma about them in the West. That's my theory and I'm sticking with it.

The Half was launched in 1963, so mine is probably half a century old. The glue has seen better days but the lens is bright and clear. Surprisingly after all this time the solar-powered selenium meter is spot-on. The 28mm f/2.8 is slightly wider and faster than the typical 30mm f/3.5 of other half-frame cameras.

I'm digressing. The Olympus Pen was a very simple camera with manual exposure controls and no lightmeter. It was followed by a second wave of more capable cameras which included, yes, the Fujica Half. I was impressed with the Half, although it tends to be overshadowed by the Fujica Drive, which had a clockwork film winder, and the Half 1.9, which had a faster lens.

The Half has manual exposure control plus a selenium autoexposure system. I'm generally wary of selenium meters because they wear out with time, and lots of cameras from the mid-century are now unusable because the meters are broken and they don't have manual exposure. But my Half's meter seemed to respond to light so I decided to try it out, and it worked!

All of the photographs in this post were taken with autoexposure. The Half has a program system ranging from f/2.8 + 1/20th to f/22 + 1/250th. With ISO 200 Fuji Superia it generally selected f/11 + 125th or thereabouts. Oddly the viewfinder shows shutter speeds up to 1/250th, but the manual speed control has 1/300 instead. Perhaps the autoexposure system is stepless.

In London only men or women are allowed to cross the road.

I scan the negatives with an Epson V500 and use the gap between frames to set the black level, which works a treat.

I've always assumed that selenium meters gradually lose their puff when exposed to light, but it seems that the real enemy of selenium cells is corrosion. Perhaps the original owner(s) kept the camera away from moisture. Hooray for that man or woman or person or thing or colour. I have no idea how much the Fujica Half cost when it was new, but it feels well-made and has a specification that was, at the time, at the higher end of the scale, so perhaps the first owner treasured it.

If the gods of Blogger's content management system are smiling down on me there should now be an interesting article / eBay shopping list from the July 1989 Popular Photography about second-wave half-frame cameras:

The Half has scale focus, with détentes at 2.9 feet (marked P, probably for Portrait) and 14.9 feet (marked G, probably for Garmonbozia / "pain and sorrow"). The aperture ranges from f/2.8 - f/22, with an A setting for autoexposure. The shutter speeds are B - 30 - 60 - 125 - 300, but you have to select an aperture before the shutter control will stick. It has a leaf shutter which makes a quiet click, and the frame counter is on the bottom of the camera. There's an off-centre tripod socket, a self-timer, and a PC socket. And a cold shoe, and some kind of flash automation that I will never use.

The lightmeter control only covers ISO 12 to ISO 200, so if you have a box of Fuji Velva 50 you're in luck; Ilford 3200 not so much. In my experience 400-speed negative film works just fine exposed at ISO 200, in fact some people overexpose by a stop to lift the shadows.

Film loading requires a bit of faith - it's one of those systems that doesn't advance film properly unless the back is closed - but it hasn't failed me yet. Is the lens any good? After poring over the scans it seems to be consistent across the frame when stopped down, although not as razor-sharp as the Ricoh Caddy I took for a spin back in 2016, and at f/2.8 the borders aren't all that great, but I can't be sure if that's the lens or mis-focusing on my part.

The shutter button feels a bit spongy, perhaps because it also has to operate the aperture/shutter needle in the viewfinder as well as tripping the shutter. Nonetheless I was impressed with the Fujica Half. Perhaps the only downside is that it doesn't have a filter thread. If you want to use a polariser you have to hold it against the lens. This isn't an issue in the United Kingdom, where the sun comes out but once a year, but perhaps when we have left the European Union we can export our clouds to extra-European nations that are short of clouds, such as e.g. Kenya or Egypt, and they can sell us sunshine in return. We could do with some sunshine.

Nikon F-301 / Nikon N2000: Beeper and the Motor Drive

In a few days' time The White Stripes' "Fell in Love with a Girl" will be fifteen years old. It wasn't their first single, but it was the first I remember seeing on television. You remember the video. It was made with Lego pieces. Little Lego pieces. Little stop-motion Lego pieces. Little stop-motion Lego pieces, moving and stopping and moving and stopping.

Moving, constantly moving, and constantly stopping. A whirling mass of plastic brought to life by invisible hands. Moving, stopping, moving, and stopping. Little Lego pieces. Today we're going to have a look at the Nikon F-301, a 35mm SLR that was sold in the United States as the Nikon N2000, although nowadays everybody calls it the Nikon F-301, except that no-one calls it anything because no-one remembers it or cares about it. Constantly moving and stopping, moving and stopping.

1985. That's when it came out. 1985. Nikon sold it alongside the F-501 / N2020, which was the same camera but with an autofocus motor. Autofocus was a big thing back then, but there was still room in the market for a manual focus camera. In November 1985 Popular Photography had a look at the F-301 and concluded that it was okay, I guess, although the reviewer basically describes the camera without passing judgement.

Check out the font in that article. It's a good example of a proportional font, e.g. the letter I in NIKON is much narrower than the letter O - but also check out how the letter O actually pushes into the cleft of the K. It's ITC Avant Garde Gothic. That's the name of the font. ITC Avant Garde Gothic.

Notice how the zeroes in N2000 overlap. Technically the official camera sponsor of the 1984 Olympics was Canon, but perhaps Nikon wanted to make people mentally associate Nikon with the Olympic games without saying so explicitly. I don't know. Fonts, eh? You can say a lot with words, a lot with spaces, a lot with the shape of words.

Nikon sold the F-301 as an entry-level beginner's camera, although compared to the later F-50 and F-70 it feels much more substantial. A few years later it would have been mid-range. The top plate is apparently made of plastic, but the chassis is metal, and overall the F-301 is heavier and more solid than I expected. Benoît Pioulard's music is fantastic. He's an ambient-indie musician (technically Benoît Pioulard is a "project" - his real name is Thomas). Pioulard's ambient music mostly sticks to a rigid formula of evolving, distorted drones, but it sounds lovely:

"Sonic sculpture" is a cliche, but in this case it's true, Pioulard's songs are like blocks of sound built to be contemplated at length, or moods that slowly pass through you. Until recently I assumed that ambient music was the entirety of his bag, but he has also made jangly indie pop and even ambient folk. Last year he broke his wrist! Unfortunately this incurred hefty medical costs. If only he had flown across the Atlantic to the UK, where he could have had the surgery for free, except that they won't let you fly if you have a broken wrist, but perhaps he could have hidden it in a big glove.

Nowadays the F-301's design smells of the 1980s. Check out that red stripe. The tasteful thickness of it. In those days it was fashionable to ask Porsche Design or Giorgetto Giugiaro to have a go at designing camera bodies. The F-301 looks like something by Porsche or Giugiaro but apparently it was designed in-house.

F-301s are available on eBay for pennies. They have no real antique value. As with the early Canon EOS cameras the body is slightly more upmarket than it appears. I bought one so I could try out my 28mm f/2.8 AI-S on a period-correct AI-S-enabled Nikon film camera, but also I was curious about this underdog. The F-301 is in the odd position of having a poor reputation - or at least a vague air of failure and pointlessness - entirely because it has no reputation at all. In its day it did nothing wrong, but it was neither a cute old antique or a high-performance modern camera, although it has some modern features.

AI-S, for example. AI-S was Nikon's early-80s attempt to bring multi-program automatic exposure to their film cameras, but instead of using electronic circuits the system used a mechanical coupling. I wrote about it in this post, when I covered the Nikon 28mm f/2.8 AI-S. It was very limited, and only a handful of cameras used it, but the lenses are highly prized today because they were optically very good and built to a higher standard than the early Nikon AF range. The F-301 was one of only four cameras that supported AI-S, although in practice it's only relevant if you use 135mm-or-longer telephoto lenses and want to have a high-speed program mode.

With an AI 20mm f/3.5

Spec-wise the F-301 resembles the Pentax A3, Canon T70 and so forth. It uses Nikon's AI lens mount; it's manual focus only; it has DX film coding and electronic film advance, but manual rewind; it has a non-standard "PPhiAM" exposure wheel, oddly without S; it takes four AAA batteries, or four AA batteries with an optional baseplate.

I have this baseplate, and with four Eneloops the F-301 lasts forever. Which is good, because it's dead weight without batteries. It doesn't have a backup mechanical shutter speed, but even if it did there would be no way to wind the film on. Unlike some motor-equipped cameras it shoots until it detects film tension rather than stopping at exactly 36 frames, so a few of my rolls had 37 exposures. When you insert film it winds on with three quick shots.

The F-301 has a beeper that beeps if the shutter speed is too slow. You can turn it off. The beeper and the motor drive are very loud.

The camera was sold as an entry-level model, but it still has some of Nikon's professional heritage. You need to press a small button before you can twist the exposure dial; ditto rewind. The motor drive runs at an unusually fast 3.5fps.

Beyond the AA baseplate there were no special accessories. No handgrip, no dedicated speedlight (the F-501 had the SB-20), no underwater case etc.

The full caption is "black dudes, you can avoid the rain drops if you smoke".

So the story goes, during the making of The Fifth Element director Luc Besson came up with an imaginary alien language for Milla Jovovich's character, and by the end of filming the pair of them were so proficient in this language that they could have entire conversations. Humanity developed language for sound practical reasons, but to what extent does language shape our consciousness? I have no idea, but the F-301 is something of a bargain on the used market. Historically it was quickly overshadowed by Nikon's new autofocus cameras. In the 1990s and 2000s it was never prized by the cult camera crowd, who instead gravitated towards Nikon's older manual focus SLRs such as the EM and F3.

On a technological level the F-301 is objectively more advanced than the F3, but the F3 has a much better viewfinder. The viewfinder is the F-301's biggest weakness. It feels cramped and I have to jam the camera against my face to see all of it. It's a shame because the other reason I bought an F-301 is because it's one of the newest Nikon cameras with a split-image viewfinder.

It uses centre-weighted metering, with a large circle in the viewfinder illustrating the metering bias. I have to admit that I've only shot negative film with it, so I can't comment on the accuracy of the metering system; it didn't stand out in any way, which I suppose is a good thing.

My F-301 was actually broken when it arrived - the mirror and shutter were jammed - but after a bit of poking it started working again, so top marks to Nikon's early-1980s engineers. It continued to work and as of 2019, when I went through this post to take out some of the swear words, it continues to work. I know this because I've just tried it. In the 1990s Nikon embraced cheapness to an alarming extent but the F-301 was perhaps the last gasp of old-school we-need-to-make-a-cheap-camera-but-we-have-standards Nikon.

If you want to experiment with film photography and old Nikon manual focus lenses the F-301 is an interesting value proposition. It can't depreciate any more, the only issue is liquidity, but you have to ask yourself if you'd rather fulfil a childhood dream and buy an F4 instead. But then again the F-301 has a split-image viewfinder as standard whereas with the F4 split-image was an option. The F-501, FA, and EM are logical alternatives, the EM in particular because it's small and cute, and that's about that for the F-301.

Diana: Rand

Let's do this. Let's do this. Sunshine and showers. Sunshine and showers. "There's a bit of magic in everything, and then some loss to even things out". Lou Reed wasn't a sentimental man, but he wasn't relentlessly downbeat either; he understood that life is complicated and multi-hued. He was driven by anger, arrogance, disappointment, he was an elitist, and he was a gigantic asshole. In fact if you search Google for "lou reed is an asshole" with quotes, you get 29 results, and only a couple of them are duplicates. "lou reed was an asshole" returns about ten more. In contrast there are no results for "david attenborough is an asshole" and only seven for "adolf hitler was an asshole", so basically Lou Reed was four times more of an asshole than Hitler. Google proves it.

"Give me your hungry, your tired, your poor, I'll piss on 'em / your poor huddled masses, let's club 'em to death". Some popular artists have an overwhelming urge to be loved by the public, but others imagine themselves standing atop a high mountain pissing on everybody beneath them, because if you're really good at something most people aren't as good as you; and there comes a point when you come to detest the laziness and stupidity of the common man. Some artists try to mask this, they put on a mask and pretend to be your friend, which if anything makes them even bigger assholes. Lou Reed's asshole wasn't hidden behind a mask. It was right there, in the middle of his face. His naked asshole.

Today we're going to have a look at Diana, except that mine isn't a Diana, it's a Rand. There were lots of different names. Anny, Diana, Clicker, Lina, Revue, Panax, Rand, loads. Why Rand? Diana emerged from Hong Kong in the 1960s and perhaps someone in Hong Kong had read about the RAND Corporation, and perhaps they hoped that Robert McNamara would buy millions of them so that he could take photographs of ICBM installations with them, because it was called Rand.

Eighteen million years ago I wrote about the Holga, a hipster camera that was popular with hipsters in the 1990s. The Holga is essentially a simplified clone of the Diana. In the 1970s the market for roll-film cameras in the West-o-sphere died out, and the Diana gradually faded away, but the people behind the Holga were convinced that they could sell a cheaper clone in the Far East and Asian markets.

As it turned out they underestimated the appeal of 35mm and Instamatic, but within a few years the Holga was adopted by hipsters in the West and it became an unlikely success but that's another story, frankie teardrop bedside manner.

Unlike the Holga, The Diana's viewfinder is mounted centrally, and it has three aperture settings instead of just one. Modern Holgas have a tripod mount and a second aperture. The Diana's film loading is awkward, with little flip-down tabs; the film has to be shoved underneath the top plate, whereas the Holga is a lot simpler to load.

The same hipsters were fans of the Diana as well, but the Diana was only available on the second-hand market, where prices were high because most of the cameras had been thrown away. They were novelty toys. Here's an article from the April 1982 Popular Photography in which a hipster - in New York, natural home of hipsters - uses his Diana to persuade people including women to take off their clothes:

Howard Chapnick died in 1996. Page eleven of the magazine has a short feature on David Em, a computer graphics pioneer of the 1970s.

Gary Schoichet has a website that was last updated ten years ago. Judging by his portraits he had no style, no skill or artistic vision, no ideas, and it appears he knew this; he gravitated to the public sector, photographing uncontroversial groups of boring people marching in support of public jobs. There are no petrol bombs in his photographs, no blood or corpses, no AK-47s. The celebrities all wear clothes. There are no naked supermodels being devoured by crocodiles, and even on a technical level they're just boring.

He sought out easy subjects and photographed them in the most basic way. Just like me, but he was GARY SCHOICHET: PHOTOGRAPHER whereas I am just a man. He was photographer-as-camera-operator, the kind of photographer who was uninterested in photography, the visual arts, uninterested in people or life or anything, the worst kind of photographer. The more I think about him the more I hate him.

Presumably there were lots of Diana hipsters in the 1980s and 1990s, SX-70 hipsters, PixelVision hipsters, but history doesn't remember their works because they operated in the pre-internet period, and are lost. In the days of Sonic Youth, when Andy Warhol was still alive, the Diana and plastic cameras like it were a cliché of the New York arts scene, just as images of ruined Detroit are a cliché today.

Which means that thirty years later I am performing a ritual that no longer has any meaning, that does not summon spirits any more. See, some artists are just no good, so they try and find a gimmick that sets them apart, but they aren't alone, and eventually other artists use the same gimmick and it becomes obvious that it's a gimmick, at which point the grants dry up and the conversations grind to a halt and the invitations stop coming. If you whip out your Diana in sophisticated company in 2015 people will just groan and ignore you. Women will most definitely not offer to take off their clothes for you, and believe me I've tried. It's not 1983 any more, or 1973, or 1993. Or even 2013, because that was two years ago.

It's 2014.

2015.

Here's a demonstration of SHRDLU, a vintage block-stacking AI, which has nothing to do with the rest of this post except that I like blocks:

It's odd that something so cutting-edge should look like a relic of the 1920s. And it's scary to think that 1925 is as far away from 1970 as 1970 is from today. "I don't understand which pyramid you mean" was the future once.

The Diana uses 120 rollfilm, but shoots a 4x4cm negative rather than the more standard 6x6. 4x4 is the same format as 127, and I wonder if it was originally designed for 127, but they chose 120 because it was more popular. It reminds me of the Italian Bencini Koroll that I wrote about a while back, although the Koroll was made of solid metal and has a better lens.

The Diana takes sixteen shots a roll, and judging by the box you were expected to contact print the negatives:

In which case the simple plastic lens wasn't so much of a problem. The lens is decently sharp in the middle but distorted around the edges, with less vignetting than the Holga, presumably because the frame size is smaller. The Holga wasn't really designed for 6x6 anyway, the classic Holga look comes from using the camera without the internal mask.

The shot of the baby is optimistic. The camera only focuses down to four feet, and is no good in low light. The single shutter speed is anything from 1/60-1/100 depending on your camera, the apertures are f/11 - f/16 - f/22. My tip - shoot with HP5 wide open all the time and go outdoors. The women in the following photograph are mocking my penis, I can tell.

The blurry edges and sharp middle approximate the look of professional large and medium format photography, which must have been seductive in the 1980s because large format cameras were very expensive. The Holga's look is more extreme, however, and the Diana feels a bit Holga-lite, and so I didn't really warm to it. And professional medium format cameras are a lot more affordable nowadays, because film is dead, and they give you more control (although they're much heavier than the Diana).

Holga / Shanghai GP3

Mamiya C3 / 65mm f/3.5 / Portra 400

You know, I'm hyped up for the New Horizons probe. It's a spaceship. SPACESHIP! And it's going to Pluto! And it's almost there. I imagine it moving into orbit around Pluto, and Pluto will just tell it to buzz off because if you're not going to let me be a planet then to hell with you.

Meanwhile NASA's Messenger probe has spent the last three years orbiting Mercury- only the second probe to visit that planet, and the first flew past it only briefly - and does anybody care? While the world eggs on Opportunity and waits to see whether New Horizons will find an alien artefact or a hyperspace portal, nobody cares about Messenger, even though it has sent back tonnes of pictures and spends half its time being blasted by the searing heat of the sun. "A good probe like they wanted"

It's probably wondering why it shouldn't just fire the thrusters and slam itself into Mercury. Or dive into the sun or something. It's too professional for that. Instead it will circle Mercury until... well, it's not going to run out of solar power, so perhaps it'll circle Mercury until long after the human race has died out, at which point it will charge up its batteries and drift off to explore the universe, having long forgotten the people that built it, just as we forgot it.

Edit: And just four months after writing that paragraph NASA did let Messenger slam into Mercury. I didn't realise at the time; I was thinking of the Apollo 12 LM, which was deliberately crashed into the moon as part of a seismic experiment. Messenger's propellant had run out so NASA let it crash. It saw things you wouldn't believe; traces of magnesium in Mercury's exosphere, heat that would kill a man in an instant. All those moments, transmitted to Earth like leaves on the solar wind. Time to die.

Olympus Pen FT: Marrakech

Olympus Pen FT / 38mm f/1.8 / Fuji Velvia 100F

Off to Marrakech (and Essaouira) with an Olympus Pen FT. At this time of year Britain's weather is the meteorological equivalent of a boot stamping on a human face forever, and I can't think of any reason to stay. In fact Britain doesn't have much going for it even at the best of times. On a strategic level the location is superb; our bombers can reach the Continent, Scandinavia, North Africa and the Middle East, and so can our airlines. Historically Britain once had vast coal deposits, which came in handy during the industrial revolution and meant that Britain was, for a time, an energy powerhouse. Nowadays Britain is an attractive investment haven. It has a stable government, a strong military, and a police force that doesn't ask questions of the very wealthy or demand bribes.

But unless you are wealthy Britain is no good. The people are stupid and fat, the weather is awful, there's no cultural or artistic tradition, everything is very expensive, and yes not all of the people are stupid and fat - Steven Hawking is clever, Keira Knightley has a BMI of 18.6, which puts her at the lower end of the normal range - but the vast majority are unsuitable for my purposes. Keira Knightley obviously is an exception. She is valuable. She is good and pure, and when I am King she will be Queen. Or Helena Bonham-Carter if Keira Knightley refuses. I know that some people don't like Keira Knightley. When I am King they will learn to love her. Or Helena Bonham-Carter. Possibly Gemma Arterton if neither of the aforementioned are available. Shirt tax, open sesame seed baby bun baby.

It's not so much that I dislike stupid fat people. I don't have a problem with stupid fat happy people. It's not even a lack of intellectual curiosity that bugs me. The problem is that Britain has a tradition of aggressively stupid people; people who aren't simply dumb, they're actively ignorant and suspicious of knowledge. As if they were dimly aware of their own inadequacies but unable to confront them. I mention this because despite the obvious merits of eliminating most of the population plus the existing Royal Family and replacing them with myself and Keira Knightley and our offspring and some robots to do the work, neither of the main political parties have so far agreed to implement my plan. Indeed the police were downright angry when I tried to present my ideas to David Cameron and they have forbidden me from sending letters to the Duke of Hamilton as well.

The Pen F is a half-frame SLR from the 1960s. Olympus made almost half a million of them spread across three different models. Mine is a Pen FT, the most popular of the three. It accounted of over half of the F's sales. Compared to the original F, the FT has an uncoupled lightmeter, single-stroke film wind-on and a couple of other tweaks. Judging by the serial number mine is apparently the very first Pen FT to leave the factory in 1971, which means that it's five years older than me.

The original Pen F was launched in 1963, in the midst of a short-lived half-frame boom. Design-wise it was the work of top late genius Yoshihisa Maitani, who sparked off the boom in 1959 with the original Pen-no-letter-just-Pen. It was a tiny but well-made compact viewfinder that shot twice as many images on standard 35mm film as the competition. Maitani wasn't quite on top of his game - in my opinion the OM and XA models were his high water mark - but at least on a visual level the Pen F is one of the best-looking cameras of all time, one of the most attractive objects of the last half-century. It looks like a cross between a rangefinder and a compact camera, but it's actually a full-blown SLR, with a through-the-lens viewfinder and an interchangeable lens mount. The half-frame format allowed Maitani to fit the shutter, viewfinder, and lens into a space about three inches cubed, with the mirror arrangement turned on its side, and as a consequence the F has the lens mount shifted off to the left.

What was half-frame? Half-frame cameras used standard 35mm film, but the images were half the size. They were the same shape as standard 35mm pictures, but turned on their side, and so when you look through the viewfinder of a Pen F the image is in portrait orientation. Half-frame was popular for a while because you could take lots of shots with short film rolls, but perhaps because of this Kodak never embraced the format, and it didn't take off in the United States. Kodak wanted people to buy more film, not less, and in the US half-frame was dwarfed, nay crushed by Instamatic and 110. Most blog posts that talk about half-frame blame the format's demise on the Minox and Rollei compact 35mm cameras of the 1970s, but half-frame was already dying off by then, and the German cameras were generally aimed at a posher market.

I've always had a soft spot for half-frame. The resolution is essentially the same as 35mm motion picture film, and it's neat having 72 shots per roll. Photo labs process it without any issues because the frame gaps are in the same place as standard 35mm, and my Epson V500 scans it without any problems. The scanner assumes that each pair of pictures is a single 35mm image with a black lamp-post running through the middle. I like the way that the images are paired; I can see a little bit of my thought processes as I selected shots, and the juxtapositions are sometimes striking. I can feel myself reactivating latent meanings by creating new adjacencies.

The original Pen F was manual everything. You had to use an external meter or informed guesswork if you wanted the pictures to turn out right. It was sold between 1963 and 1966. Olympus enlisted top late photojournalist and Hemingway-esque photographic icon Eugene Smith for the adverts, although I have no idea whether he actually used a Pen F in real life. He was a fan of smaller film formats, and had been sacked by Newsweek in the 1930s for refusing to use 5x4 plate cameras, and photojournalists are a pragmatic lot, and (breathe in) the Pen F would have been pretty much a drop-in replacement for contemporary Leicas, and I began this sentence some time ago, and it now has a life of its own, and it would be wrong to end it

The FT was sold from 1966 right until the end of the run, in 1972. The uncoupled electronic lightmeter means that you still have to set the shutter and aperture yourself, but with the FT there's a readout in the viewfinder that helps you. It has a strip of numbers, running 0-7 from top to bottom, that match up with numbers on the lens. You're supposed to set the shutter to roughly the correct speed, check the meter, and then select (say) 3 on the lens. The lens also has a conventional aperture scale which you can bring into play by pulling and twisting the aperture ring 180 degrees.

The shutter runs from one second to 1/500th, with flash sync at all speeds. The Pen FT has a PC terminal but no hotshoe, so you have to mount the flash on a bracket. My FT was made in 1971, forty-three years ago, but the shutter and meter are still accurate. The shutter fires with a reassuringly solid sound. This is one respect where rangefinders have the Pen F beat; rangefinders are usually much quieter.

The meter uses PX625 mercury batteries, which were discontinued long ago. I have an adapter that lets me use silver oxide 386 batteries instead. Of late a Russian source on eBay has started selling PX625s, apparently from a military stockpile, so you have to ask yourself whether you want to (a) buy one of these batteries for £10 but run the risk that it will explode or contain a bug (b) spend £30 on an adapter (c) spend £100 on a second-hand Sekonic L-308. Good luck! Assuming you want to use the meter at all. Mine is still accurate, you might want to check yours before you shoot slide film. For this article I used an external meter for the first five minutes and then gave up on it because the FT's meter is accurate enough for slide film.

Velvia 100F

The FT had a couple of physical tweaks to support the meter. There's a window in the top plate that channels sunlight into the meter display so that you can see it clearly. The viewfinder itself is dimmer than the F, because some of the light is diverted to the meter. The shutter speed dial runs from ISO 25 to ISO 400, which means that you're going to have to do some mental mathematics if you want to use faster film. Given that this is 2014, and the only films left are Ektar 100 and Fuji Superia 400, that's less of a problem than it was in the 1990s.

The FT was followed by the FV, which was an FT without the meter, but with the original Pen F's brighter viewfinder. It was available in chrome and black, and was sold as a budget alternative to the FT. As fate would have it the black FVs are now the most sought-after Pen F model, because they look awesome and they have a nice viewfinder. The Pen F range was discontinued in 1972, making way for the compact, full-frame Olympus OM.

The Pen F was the only half-frame SLR with interchangeable lenses, although surprisingly it wasn't the only half-frame SLR. In 1988 Yashica tried to revive the format with the Samurai, an autofocus bridge camera with a through-the-lens viewfinder and a built-in zoom lens. It looked like a video camera and seems to have sold well enough for a plethora of badge-engineed copies, although nobody remembers it nowadays.

Olympus sold a small range of Pen F lenses, which ran from a 20mm wide angle to a rare and expensive 800mm mirror lens plus a couple of telephoto zooms. For years after the demise of the Pen F they languished in obscurity until a new wave of interchangeable-lens digital rangefinders made them desirable again. They're well-made, cute little metal lenses that can be adapted for Micro Four-Thirds and Sony NEX bodies. Half-frame has a cropping factor of 1.4x, roughly the same as APS-H, so the 20mm f/3.5 is a 28mm, the standard 38mm is a 53mm, the 60mm f/1.5 portrait lens is an 84mm, etc. On M43 digital bodies the focal length is doubled, on NEX it's multiplied by 1.6.

The big star lens was a 42mm f/1.2. The slightly posh normal was a 40mm f/1.4. Apart from the 800mm mirror lens there were no exotics - no fisheye, no soft focus, no tilt-shift, although there was a 38mm macro and a 38mm pancake. Zeiss built a prototype 54mm f/2, but otherwise there were no third party lenses for the system. Olympus sold adapters that allowed standard SLR lenses to fit on the Pen F, but these adapters are rare and expensive nowadays. I have only ever seen M42 and T-Mount adapters, but there were apparently Nikon and OM adapters as well. EDIT: About a year later I found a Nikion-F adapter. There was also a Leica M39 adapter, although sadly this only allowed M39 lenses to focus in the macro range.

I only have the standard 38mm f/1.8. EDIT: Although many years later I bought the 25mm f/2.8, which is just as good but less bokeh-licious. I don't have a problem with it. It focuses very closely, I didn't notice any distortion or CA or glow. The filter thread is an odd 43mm. It's interesting to compare it with the later OM lenses - the aperture stop-down and lens release buttons are mounted on the lens rather than the camera body, but whereas OM lenses had them at 180 degrees from each other Pen F lenses mount them at 45 degrees, like Dalek ears.

I mention up the page that the Pen F is a good-looking camera. The styling has something of the jet age about it, particularly the dynamic step in the top plate. Maitani reused this design idea in the later Trip 35, which seems to have been based heavily on the Pen F but with the lens mount put in the middle rather than off to one side. The gently curving body is nice to hold and looks as if it is bulging with goodness. It's roughly the same size as an Olympus OM or Pentax ME but shorter and flatter; it's not as small as I was expecting, although it fits into a pocket much more easily than a conventional SLR because it's smooth. It's surprisingly heavy, too, although that makes it feel more expensive. I'm sure that Mr Man-About-Town circa 1962 would have been thrilled to buy a Pen for his wife, and would have felt that he got his money's worth. Judging by an article on Popular Mechanics, September 1964, the price of the Pen F was around $140 back then, which hovers around $1,000 nowadays.

On the negative side the shutter speed dial looks like an afterthought. It's not quite in the right place to turn without taking your hand off the camera, and it spoils the body's smooth lines. The OM system had the shutter dial mounted around the lens mount, and it's a shame Maitani didn't have the idea ten years earlier. On a mechanical level the Pen F is apparently a tricky repair. The shutter is a metal semi-circle that rotates very quickly rather than flapping up and down. It's made of titanium, but it's very thin and easily damaged. It seems that there were no obvious design flaws, but with twice as many shots per roll the cameras apparently wear out and the compact innards are difficult to work on. Mine has a sticker inside the film area stating that it was served by South Coast Camera Engineers, Southsea, although sadly there's no date. The company appears to have gone bust in 1985. It's odd to think of the Pen F and 1985 in the same mental breath. The F's metal body and curvaceous styling would have seemed centuries old in the mid 1980s.

And, yes, Marrakech. And Essaouira. It was the beginning of December but not once did I hear Slade's "Merry Xmas Everybody". Marrakech has not changed very much since I was there last, reason being that it is starved of investment. There is a new shopping mall under construction between the centre of town and the airport but in general the potholes are the same, the crumbling semi-completed buildings are still half-finished. The poverty is charming if you're a tourist - poor people are cute - but probably not much fun if you have to live there, especially if you're a young man looking forwards to a future of sitting behind a market stall until you die, earning just enough to live but nowhere near enough to improve your life or the lives of your children.

My solution would be to demolish the marketplace, move the poor people to slums on the outskirts, slash tax, basically strip-mine the country and use the locals as slave labour, with myself as king and the most beautiful Moroccan woman as Queen, although we would spend most of our time outside the country, in an expensive house in London that the people of Morocco paid for. This wouldn't help the people of Marrakech very much, but as King of Morocco I would have to ask myself whether it is better for all Moroccans to be poor, or for one of them to be very wealthy. And if the burden of wealth has to fall on my shoulders, so be it.

Putting on my serious hat, it seems that without oil or any other means of "cheating", Morocco's economy relies on slow, steady growth, and that in order for this to work and for the people to have a better life, the economy has to be managed; managed efficiently; managed efficiently over the course of decades, nay centuries; and that it has to be managed openly and transparently, so that the population understand why they can't have 4K televisions now, but their children might. The problem is that stable, effective long-term economic management is difficult, and Morocco is at the mercy of crises both external and internal.

Is it that simple? Are the problems facing North and South Africa really that simple? Is it the case that wisdom, strength, unity and respect are the only things needed to manage a country effectively? Why haven't more countries adopted those values? I can only attribute it to human error.

The Atlas Mountains are far away