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.

Expired Film from Long Ago

"Everything has its time and everything dies", and so it is with photographic film.

But not, surprisingly, the careers of Kerry Katona and Danniella Westbrook. They had their time - very briefly, in the case of Kerry Katona - but it seems that they are destined to remain famous forever. Long after the sun has swallowed the Earth, they will drift through space, like spores. Perhaps one day they will alight on an alien world and come to life again, or perhaps they will survive the gradual heat death of the universe to become the monobloc - the duobloc - from which a new universe arises. A universe birthed of two mothers. It will be called Dannatona, although no-one will ever know this.

Photographic film. It expires. Entropy claims it. Slow black and white film can survive for many years, fast colour film mutates quickly, slide film dies, and in between there is a spectrum. The weather was nice so I decided to grab some films from a box in the bottom of my wine cellar and see what they were like. I put them in my Yashica Mat and had a stroll.

About a year ago I bought a bunch of Kodak Plus-X Pan Professional that had expired in 1977. Plus-X was launched in the 1950s and discontinued in 2011. No-one missed it much. It had none of the character of Tri-X or the technological acumen of T-MAX. It was an unexceptional black and white film with flat tonality, bought and shot in bulk by boring professionals.

All the black and white shots in this post were taken with Plus-X. After experimenting with exposure I settled on ISO 10, but even then the film base had a distinctive texture that looks like wood grain. I developed it - a lot - with Rodinal.

The other roll I shot is harder to pin down. It was colour negative film, and the code suggests that it belongs to the old Vericolor family, but it doesn't appear in any of the tables available on the internet. I shot it at ISO 64 but I suspect no amount of exposure compensation would make it good. The dyes in colour film age at different rates, and this particular roll seems to have been light-struck.

Why did the light affect just that stripe? I have no idea. On the whole both the colour and the black and white film are destroyed equally, but the Plus-X is destroyed in a consistent way. There was a fad in the 1970s for having your body frozen just before you died, so that you could be revived in the future. I think it's safe to say that those people are never coming back. Presumably they will be defrosted and cremated at some point; it will be a gruesome process. Whatever remains of their brains will be as scrambled as the Plus-X.

Perhaps it's easier to imagine that instead of being creatures that are born into a universe that exists outside us, we are instead universes of our own.

In comparison I shot some ordinary, in-date Fuji 400, and it looked like this:

"They call you little mouse by name in Rome and Turin"

EDIT: This image was shot many months later, several miles away - they're like llamas.

American readers are probably thinking "what is that car?". It's a Nissan Figaro, a retro-styled compact from the 1990s that was generally only sold in Japan, South East Asia, and Europe. Despite being made in very limited numbers it's a common sight in the UK because they're reliable and people look after them. The design has aged exceptionally well and future archaeologists will be puzzled by it, the end.

Olympus Pen F 40mm f/1.4: Ruined Smiling

Let's have a look at the Olympus Zuiko 40mm f/1.4. It was one of the standard lenses for the Olympus Pen F half-frame SLR of the 1960s, faster than the standard 38mm f/1.8, less pancake-y than the 38mm f/2.8, and cheaper than the flagship 42mm f/1.2. Half-frame cameras had a 1.4x crop factor, so the 40mm is a slightly narrow 56mm in full-frame 35mm terms.

Physically the 40mm and 38mm are very similar. My 40mm lens is an early model with a conventional aperture ring. When Olympus launched the Pen FT they modified the lenses to work with the FT's lightmeter - the aperture ring could be rotated to show a set of numbers that corresponded with the lightmeter scale, although you could use conventional f-stops if you wanted.

As you can see the coatings appear to be different - the 40mm has a golden hue, the 38mm is much subtler. Compared to full-sized SLR lenses they are both tiny little jewels with cute end caps. The lens hood is a retro affair that clamps gently onto the front of the lens.

Performance-wise they're essentially the same; sharp in the middle at all apertures, no obvious optical deficits. Judging by this test the corners aren't so good at wider apertures, but for a fast standard lens that doesn't really matter because the corners will never be in focus. For the night-time shots in this article I used ISO 100 Agfa Precisa slide film, with the lens wide-open and the shutter at 1/30th or 1/15th, and it was sharp where it mattered.

Perhaps because the frame is vertical I find that lenses seem wider on the Pen F. The 40mm didn't feel limiting. If you already have the 38mm there isn't really a compelling reason to switch to the 40mm, but on the other hand you could sell the 38mm to fund your purchase of the 40mm, which is what I did.

The Pen F
Along with the lens I got hold of an original Pen F. Olympus sold three Pen SLRs. The Pen F (1963) was manual-everything, with no lightmeter. The Pen FT (1966) added a lightmeter and some tweaks, and the FV (1967) kept the tweaks but removed the lightmeter. The FT had a dimmer viewfinder window than the other two - some of the light was diverted into the meter - and having compared them them side-by-side with an F I can confirm that this is noticeable. The Pen F's ground glass focus screen seems to "pop" whereas the FT is a bit vague. Let's have a look at those tweaks, Pen F on the right, FT on the left:

Full-frontal nudity was taboo in Hollywood films for most of the first half of the 20th Century. There were scattered instances of full-frontal nudity in some of the edgier, artier films of the 1960s, but pubic hair didn't became hot box-office until Catch-22 in 1970. From that point onwards almost every Hollywood film had pubic hair, until of course Star Wars ushered in a new era of family-friendly blockbusters, but surely Chewbacca is naked, so perhaps Star Wars had masses of pubic hair after all.

Apropos of nothing, a Pen F shot with an infrared camera

I grew up in the 1980s, a time when pubic hair was no longer in vogue; it's not that nudity was unacceptable (NSFW), it's that pubic hair was seen as a throwback to the unwashed hippy era, and so women shaved it off. Nudity in the 1980s was clean-shaven, generally topless, and the women looked as if they had been to the gym at least once. The FT added a self-timer lever so you can take selfies, and the shutter speed dial became one of those lift-and-twist things so that you could set the lightmeter's ISO. Along the way the F's peculiar gothic logo was removed, although it remained on the lens caps. Why did Olympus decide on a gothic font for such a modernist camera? Dunno.

Let's look at the back and top:

The FT has a little rectangular window that shines light into the viewfinder, illuminating the lightmeter scale. It works surprisingly well provided you don't put your finger over it. The FT also has a single-stroke winder, whereas with the Pen F you have to pull the little winding lever twice when you advance the film.

Hollywood has had an odd relationship with bottom nudity. In films such as Splash and Cocoon it was a way of showing nudity in a PG context, but back then bottoms were not nearly as central to our collective sexuality as they are today. In the past bottoms were funny rather than sexy, but over the last twenty years or so Western culture has embraced bottoms. Celebrities such as Kim Kardashian and Jennifer Lopez and Elliot Offen have built business empires on their bottoms.

The F and FT have slightly different bottoms; the tripod mount is in a different place, and as a consequence you have to use different cases:

The FT also has a hole for the battery.

How about the sides? The F's more compact winding lever looks more elegant. NB there wasn't a motor drive or speed winder for the Pen F system; on the whole it had a limited range of accessories, mostly concentrated in the macro and medical imaging fields. Half-frame was apparently also popular for police mugshots, although the police generally used modified full-frame SLRs.

The Pen F range had cold accessory shoes that mounted on the viewfinder, which is why so many of them have chipped or broken viewfinder surrounds. The cameras had flash sync at all speeds with the PC socket above (the X marking is for electronic flashes, the M is for old-fashioned flash bulbs).

I like the Pen F. It's small and perfectly-formed, and it's a proper SLR. So far I've used the 38mm, 40mm, and 25mm f/2.8 lenses; the system was modest and concentrated in the normal-to-telephoto range, perhaps because the vertical format lent itself to portraits, or perhaps because the smaller format wasn't ideal for large landscape prints. There was only one lens wider than 25mm, a 20mm f/3.5.

Pen F lenses can be adapted for use on Micro Four-Thirds and NEX cameras with a simple metal ring; they're generally smaller than their modern autofocus equivalents, and a couple of them will fit into a jacket pocket. Alas there's no easy way to mount them on a full-frame SLR, so I can't objectively evaluate their performance. Nonetheless the 40mm f/1.4 pleases me, and that's what matters.