When I was a kid we did a lot of traveling including some big trips to Europe while my dad worked over there, but also trips down south and out west.
One of the things I remember most about those trips was taking pictures.
We took half-frame slides using an Olympus Pen-F. This was a small SLR that took “single frame” photos on 35mm film. Of course since most other SLRs took “double frame” photos, the common way everyone referred to the Pen F’s photos was “half frame”. The cool thing about this half frame stuff was that you could take twice as many photos per roll of film. I think this just meant we took twice as many photos as everybody else. We took a lot — and most of them are still in trays at my parents’ house.
I thought about this again today, because Olympus has just come out with a new camera that has much of the look and feel — and maybe some of the spirit — of the Pen F. It’s called the E-P1. There’s no viewfinder, so it’s not exactly an SLR, but it does have interchangeable lenses and a lot of “SLR”-like features, including the fancier video recording capabilities that higher-end cameras are getting. But like the Pen F, it’s significantly smaller than all SLRs and even than many other point-and-shoot cameras without changeable lenses.
And of course with digital cameras, you don’t end up with trays full of slides you’ll never look at.
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