Sunday 28 February 2021

'ADDITIONAL POURTRAYALS [sic]'

"One of the internet's most intriguing capabilities, for a topographical film-maker, was that it offered contemporaneous views of distant landscapes. During 1996, I had heard that there were websites where one could access the cameras that observe traffic on UK motorways, and immediately conceived a strong desire to explore, and perhaps to sample, what I imagined would be a large and increasing number of real-time moving images of landscapes throughout the world. I wondered, perhaps, one day, I might be able to make a film without leaving the house."
Patrick Keiller, 'The Robinson Institute'

"And then, again, a sudden light, and recurring darkness.”
O. Winter, ‘The Cinematograph’, May 1896

Just short of a year ago, I filmed two views in Ilford, with an 8mm camera facing the locations which had once been entrances to Britannia Works, a large factory site that was the main manufacturing base for the photographic company that became Ilford, Limited, and wrote about this as 'Workers Not Leaving The Factory'. Due to a sense of dissatisfaction with the results, I had a desire to revisit the location and film the site again. In the latter part of last year, I realised that the opportunity might coincide with either one of two significant anniversaries: in December, it would 125 years since August and Louis Lumière demonstrated projected moving photographic images to a paying audience, which, despite other prior claimants, is seen to mark 'the birth of cinema'. The other anniversary was 21st February, when the Lumières' films were first shown before a paying audience in London in 1896.

Original 2x8mm negative, digitally inverted

Last year, I shot the film on Ilford FP4 Plus, using a length of 16mm-wide film cut down from medium format. As a result, this did not have perforations, but I found that, imperfectly, this would be driven through a Bolex B8 camera by the friction of the pull-down claws alone. Using this film involved many compromises, particularly in duration, so I had been looking out for Ilford ciné film on a certain well-known auction site, and, eventually, a couple of rolls of 16mm Ilford Fast Pan film turned up, and were purchased. The labels on both read "date of test 6.1.69", meaning that the film would have been made at the Britannia Works site in Ilford before production there stopped in the mid-1970s. In addition, I also acquired a couple of Kodak 16mm movie cameras, one of which was made in England, so I was set to film a new version of 'Workers Not Leaving The Factory' at the site of the now-demolished factory, with vintage Ilford film made there, and possibly with an English-made 16mm camera. The ideas that I had touched upon in writing about the filming last year were still appropriate of course, but I hoped the material aspect of this action now had more resonance.

Ilford Fast Pan 16mm Film

The current coronavirus pandemic, and its particular severity in the UK, upset my plans. I had filmed last year on the 3rd of March. Less than two weeks later, my workplace moved to remote working, preceding the government's general 'stay at home' injunction by a little over a week itself. In December 2020, I was still recovering from Covid-19, having contracted the virus in mid-November, which precluded filming on the 28th, the date of the Lumières' first public showing at the Salon Indien du Grand Café, Paris, in 1895. With daily new infection rates in the tens of thousands, and infections in London running at an estimated rate of around 1 in 30 of the population by the beginning of January, new restrictions were put in force across the UK. Having largely recovered from the virus myself by the second anniversary date of 21st February when the Lumières' films were first shown in London, I could have returned to Ilford to shoot these two locations again. However, the 'stay at home' injunction still applied. Reasons to leave home included travelling to a workplace if that work could not reasonably be carried out at home; arguably, this filming could have come under this definition of 'work', but I felt it was hardly within the spirit of the rules. Another reason for leaving home would be for daily exercise, once a day, and I have used my daily exercise to take photographs while walking a route around my local area; in this rule, the 'local' is stressed: although Ilford is less than 5 miles from where I currently live, again, this feels outside the spirit of the rules, particularly so when one uses a tripod, which makes the act of taking photographs (or filming) seem less like an incidental aspect of daily exercise and something more intentional.

Given the 'stay at home' order, nevertheless I still wanted to mark this anniversary. The act of projection itself, appropriately, would take the place of location in importance. Last year's film physically existed as two negatives, 16mm-wide, without perforations, the frames running in both directions along their lengths. Having been given a dual-format 8mm/Super-8 projector for Christmas, if I could make a positive print from these negatives, I could project my film. With perforations it would have been possible to make a contact print by sandwiching the negative film on top of a roll of unexposed film and, running both through a camera, this would expose the fresh film through the negative, and, once developed, this would result in a positive print. However, in using cut down Ilford FP4 Plus film, my original negative didn't have perforations. Although the film had gone through the camera without perforations at the time I shot it, trying to run this back through the camera with perforated film underneath might have worked, but my Bolex B8 had developed a fault with its motor, and wasn't running properly (I also think that there would be a high likelihood of the unperforated negatives slipping against the fresh film; if the negative had perforations this would keep the two layers of film aligned while running through the camera).

The only practical solution within easy reach was to expose the two separate negative lengths as a contact print with fresh film underneath. As the original negative had erratic frame spacing, there was no way of ensuring that the frames would be correctly aligned with the perforations in the positive print, so, as a fait accompli, there was simply no point in worrying about accurate registration. The hardest part of the exercise was lining up the long strips of 16mm-wide film in complete darkness before exposing these, only partly successful, and this became another contingent fact in the print, whereby the successive frames wander in both horizontal and vertical directions as a result. Not having a single sheet of glass large enough to cover the whole film, I used two sheets in an attempt to keep the film as flat as possible during exposure, with some of the film not held flat at either end and the edges of the glass showing in the prints. 

Orwo UP21 DS8 Film
I tried a test with 1970s Orwo UP15 2x8mm film stock, which, although I've had good results in the past from similar vintages, was too fogged to be of any use. For the final prints I used Orwo UP21 double Super-8 film with a develop before date of April 1991. Double Super-8 (or DS8) film and cameras use the principle of 2x8mm film in that the camera exposes frames on one half of the width of roll of 16mm-wide film, which is then flipped around at its end and run through the camera a second time, exposing the other half; once developed the film is split into two 8mm widths which are then spliced together–the crucial difference is that the DS8 format uses the much smaller Super-8 perforations, ensuring a larger frame size, while taking advantage of not using the plastic Super-8 cartridge with its built-in plastic film gate, supposedly allowing for better frame registration, as well as other aspects of 2x8mm, such as being able to run the film backwards through the camera for in-camera effects like dissolves made by the double-exposure of a fade-in over a fade-out.

I made one test with the UP21 DS8 film to get a rough idea of exposure, then contact printed the negatives onto the film, developing it in Ilfotec LC29 diluted 1+19 for 9 minutes at 20ºC. I cut these prints to 8mm width by hand, somewhat imperfectly (I had ordered a 2x8mm splitter the day before, realising this would be useful, but I went ahead with cutting the prints by hand, not thinking that the splitter would arrive a couple of hours later).

Contact print on Orwo UP21 DS8 film;
the diagonal white line lower right is the edge of one sheet of glass

Unable to film in Ilford on the 21st, I wanted to connect–visually–the projection of my film from last year to the site with some form of simultaneousness to Ilford on the 21st of February. I conceived that the manner of achieving this could be through streaming a live projection of a webcam from the town and recording both projections at the same time. I found just one such instance online with any kind of proximity to the site of Britannia Works: a traffic camera on the A118 Romford Road looking in the direction of Ilford Hill, across the river Roding underneath the A406 flyover. Britannia Works would have been off to the right of the field of view of this camera, but at some point Ilford Limited had expanded their operations to include properties between Roden Street and Ilford Hill, including the use of a skating rink, which would have been somewhere in the location of the building with the white double-height ground floor seen on the camera. Close by, there is another camera on Mill Lane, offline at the time of writing: in my research I found no connection between the paper mill which gives the road its name and the raw materials supplied to Ilford for the manufacture of photographic paper. There is also a webcam focused on a depth gauge in the Roding, although this only provided a still image; this could be 'animated' through refreshing a web browser window to update the image, but this had less of the 'liveness' of the traffic camera, although there was an association there to be had with the anecdote in Silver by the Ton of drying the glass used for photographic plates by the banks of the river while the area was still semi-rural at the end of the nineteenth century, as well as the risk of flooding on Riverdene Road that caused the houses that once backed onto Britannia Works there to be built with a slightly raised lower storey.

Contact print on Orwo UP21 DS8 film; 
the second location on Riverdene Road

The passage from Patrick Keiller's 'The Robinson Institute' that continues from the quote at the top of this post quickly punctures its utopian idea: Keiller goes on to write about how this promise of electronic flânerie was more imagined than realised at the time, in the late 1990s, there being relatively few websites providing actual live streams rather than, like the flood gauge in the Roding, still images that needed constant refreshment. At the time of writing twenty-five years later, the idea of scouring the internet for websites showing live images from anywhere around the world–for some experiential form of spatially-dislocated dérive–seems to me something of a relic of the idealistic promise of those early years. Other forms have supplanted the simple live webcam view: the experience of Google Street View, for example, while affording the opportunity to travel virtually through many towns and cities around the world does not allow the user to experience the simultaneousness of the live stream; this simultaneousness is now part of the everyday with various videoconferencing platforms, but using these has a tendency to subsume any kind of pleasure in the experience of dislocation into pragmatic and productive concerns.

The traffic camera I found looking in the direction of Ilford Hill only provides a short loop of a few seconds: this loop is updated every few minutes online. However, this suited my purposes as the short lengths of film that I projected are only seconds long (I didn't have the right equipment to splice the film together into one continuous length), and each section would have to be separately threaded into the projector; in the interim I could refresh the page to update the loop from the traffic camera to its most recent version. This webcam stream also had a date and timestamp, functioning as evidence to the specificity of the day I projected and recorded it as 'live', returning to the location remotely. There was a provisional quality to the composition of these two projections, utilising an otherwise neglected corner of a room, furnishing it with some of the ephemera that I'd collected in my research into the history of the Britannia Works site in Ilford, sufficient to give a texture to the white walls. I had envisaged the possibility of recording this set up with multiple camera angles, close ups of the various elements within the frame: the business of just projecting the film and documenting this action took precedence over anything more complex than a single angle, static camera.

I had problems in the actual projection of the film I had made. The short lengths had no leader: I had made the contract prints longer than the negative strips, with this extra length acting as a leader, but leader material tends, I think, to be a little thicker than the film itself. The projector I used has automatic threading, which frequently refused the prints I'd made; sometimes these would go through smoothly, but did not always come out the other end of the film path of the projector (also an issue to do with the material's thickness), which then had a tendency to fold itself up inside the projector, and, once creased, was even less likely to cleanly run through the projector, jamming in the gate, which sometimes could be shepherded through by toggling the frame. In addition, thanks to being hand cut, some parts of the film were a millimetre or so too wide, which was relatively easily solved by trimming a sliver from the edge; some parts of the film were not wide enough, and this caused it to jam, possibly by having too much side-to-side play when engaging the projector's pull down mechanism. Despite these issues I was able to film the four separate parts of the footage (each location's filming having been broken over the two lengths of the original cut-down negative); I also kept a section where one length of film jammed in the projector's gate, partly as this print shows a good deal of the lettering in the film rebate, notably 'ILFORD' itself. The duration is shorter than the original film: this was shot at 12 frames per second; although the projector does have adjustable frame rates, it seems to only run at 16fps. I tried slowing the playback to 75%, but found the distortion of the slower audio (even at its original pitch) more distracting than anything gained by seeing the film at the rate intended. With all these contingent factors, the film itself as projected has become fragmentary and somewhat abstract, the image sliding across the frame, hard to fix. Perhaps, in terms of "photographs in motion" (a phrase from David Campany in Photography and Cinema, on the Lumières' first film) the least obstructive section is the very brief few frames in which a pedestrian crosses the screen, but the focus here is off, partly due to the contact print, compounded by the projection itself, in which, thanks to the hand-made quality of the material, needed constant readjustment.

Contact print on Orwo UP21 DS8 film showing both
irregular vertical and horizontal framing

Writing about the beginnings of Ilford, Limited under Alfred Harman last year, I described it as "literally a cottage industry" in that, having outgrown his basement on Cranbrook Road, Harman rented a cottage on the Clyde Estate as his first expansion into the location which would become Britannia Works, rapidly incorporating many more cottage buildings, some of which remained on the site until demolition nearly a century later. This use of domestic space as a site of production was something I wrote about at the end of 'Workers Not Leaving The Factory', or rather, more specifically, the de-localising or re-localising of production outside of a strict spatial definition of 'the workplace'. The global pandemic has accelerated some of these trends, while delineating what kind of work could be moved online easily (although not always pursued) against work impossible to carry out remotely. Surrounding the filming in Ilford a year ago, the consumption the supermarket that has replaced Britannia Works allows relies on the productive work, necessarily tied to a number of spatially-located specificities, non-virtual, culminating in the supermarket itself; the construction work just off-frame is also solidly tied to the real, real bricks, real concrete, and the physical labour required to configure these materials into living spaces, such spaces now co-opted into being the site of production for many, unforeseen a year ago.

The title used here comes from a reproduction of the original programme of the Lumière films shown in London in 1896: their first film, of workers leaving the Lumière factory, is not among the titles listed, but the possibility that it may have been shown is tantalisingly suggested by the promise that the programme "will be selected from the following subjects, and will be liable to frequent changes, as well as ADDITIONAL POURTRAYALS [sic]".


Sources/Further reading:
David Campany, Photography and Cinema, Reaktion Books, London 2008 (2012 reprint)
RJ Hercock and GA Jones, Silver by the Ton - A History of Ilford Limited 1879-1979, McGraw-Hill, London, 1979
Patrick Keiller, 'The Robinson Institute', The View From the Train, Verso 2013
O. Winter, ‘The Cinematograph’, The New Review, May 1896 (https://picturegoing.com/?p=4166 retrieved 21/3/20)


See also the bibliography of 'Workers Not Leaving The Factory'.

Monday 22 February 2021

Ten Years On

A year ago, thinking ahead to February 2021, I decided that I wanted to mark the ten years since I began this blog in February 2011. I've written a number of posts, not every year, but at various intervals using the anniversary to take stock of the state of film photography, writing about new films appearing on the market and some disappearing, and, locally, the closing of shops that I'd patronised over the years. One notable factor in shooting film in 2021 is the price of secondhand equipment: I began the blog around the time that prices of used cameras was low, with the preceding decade seeing digital take over from film, and the smartphone taking the place of most peoples' camera. Part of the reason for starting the blog was due to having bought a few secondhand cameras in the previous three or four years while these were cheap, which coincided with getting a job in which I had access to a darkroom, and the convenience of developing my own negatives for the first time since I had been at college in the mid-1990s, and then subsequently acquiring the necessary kit to develop at home.

During the decade that I've being writing the blog, I've been surprised at how I've taken to obscure formats, mainly 127 rollfilm and subminiature cameras; similarly, the stubborn resilience of the double-8 or 2x8mm ciné film format in the 2020s is also surprising, Super-8's 'foolproof' drop in cartridge system having supposed to have killed it off in the 1960s. Although I've mostly used decades-old 2x8mm film, I have bought some new film from the Film Photography Project, from which I'd buy more if import duties weren't a consideration. I have done much less printing than perhaps I would have wanted (the darkroom print is the ultimate expression of a photographic negative), spending a lot of time scanning negatives instead. I have shown physical prints only on a couple of occasions over this time, in the Documents and Undertow exhibitions; both of these instances have been quite tied to work on and around this blog. Over the past ten years I have gradually turned to more theoretical or philosophical aspects (for want of a better description) of film photography: this has been partly due to starting a part-time PhD half-way through the life of this blog, which is still ongoing, and perhaps moving its focus away from film photography as it develops. This has meant that I have written less than I thought I might in recent years.

Olympus Pen EE-3 35mm half-frame camera
Specifically, to mark ten years of this blog, I decided that I should revisit the subject of my initial post: the Olympus Pen EE-3 35mm half-frame camera. I planned to use the Pen EE-3 over the course of the year, from February 2020, and write a new post. The original piece was not as detailed as some of my posts on cameras have become, and I didn't write that much about the camera in use, and only provided one example image. I did write a little on my own personal history with the Pen EE-3, mentioning how it was inspired in part by the work of Mick Williamson - and just discovering the half-frame format itself, the serendipity of the Olympus Pen EE-3 showing up in the local camera shop window. In 1997, the secondhand Pen EE-3 cost around the same as my weekly rent as a student, although this wouldn't be a good example of the relative costs of secondhand prices then, as inflation in UK housing costs has outstripped any other aspects of household expenditure that I can think of.

Olympus Pen EE-3 with Ilford HP5 Plus (first roll through the camera?)
I was taken by the idea of Mick Williamson's half-frame diary project (of which I can barely have seen a handful of images from at the time - but it was the idea of it as much as any example), and, although I wouldn't want to compare my work with his, for a number of years after I bought the camera, I carried it with me everywhere. It documented the end of my degree, and then the 'ghostworld' years immediately after graduating, which covered a period of being unemployed through to moving back to London in 1999, and then a few years getting to know more of London than the areas where I grew up and studied in before I'd moved away for my degree. I seem to have used the camera less after 2001, and, absent from my first post, the camera was stolen in a burglary in 2003. I bought another Olympus Pen EE-3 shortly afterwards to replace it and notably used this when travelling, to Copenhagen, to Zagreb, where I took just the Pen EE-3 and a 6x9 medium format folding camera. It also came with me to Paris, Berlin, St Petersburg in subsequent years, but my interest in the Olympus Pen EE-3 waned as I began to use other cameras - subminiature cameras, the Agat 18K - to fulfil the EE-3's 'snapshot' function.

19th February 2020. Olympus Pen EE-3 with Eastman Double-X

Resolving to use the Pen EE-3 for a year from February 2020, the first intimations of the seriousness of Covid-19 were then making themselves apparent. The first roll I used was Double-X, and among the shots on that roll was one of a mannequin in Berwick Street that, retrospectively, feels prescient. For a second roll, I shot a 36-exposure roll of Agfaphoto APX400, which I began in February, which documented something of the UCU strike that affected my studies, into early March, and then the UK went into lockdown. I didn't finish this second roll until May, mostly then shooting on my allowed daily exercise, usually cycling around my local area; in the middle there was a gap during which I wasn't taking many photos other than the lockdown projects. I subsequently shot a roll of Kentmere Pan 100, and Ilford FP4 Plus during the summer, when coronavirus cases were low, and restrictions were being lifted, although I personally took little advantage of this at the time.

22nd February 2020. Olympus Pen EE-3 with Agfaphoto APX400
My plan for shooting with the Olympus Pen EE-3 for the year was curtailed when the camera developed a fault: I had noticed that when advancing the film, there was occasionally a grinding sensation, different from the usual 'ratchet' feel to winding on the film; while out on the Bank Holiday in August, this was much worse, and the cause became apparent. The lens-shutter unit had worked itself loose - the shutter still fired, but advancing the film caused uneven frame spacing - without the lens held tightly against the body, the film would just keep winding. I wasn't aware at the time, but this looseness of the lens also meant that the focus was now off. I did think that perhaps I could repair the camera, or replace it to continue my year of using the Pen EE-3, but I was back to work the very next day, in person for the first time since March, then my enthusiasm waned with the disappointing results from this roll once developed, the pressures of work during the pandemic and the rising second wave, and then contracting Covid-19 itself, and experiencing various symptoms for many weeks afterwards disrupted many plans. Shooting a year with the Olympus Pen EE-3 was one of these.

I had intended to write 'In Praise of the Olympus Pen Part 2' but this problem with the EE-3 complicated matters. I would have said that the Pen EE-3 was generally a reliable camera: I had my first secondhand Pen EE-3 for six years without any issues; the second one lasted more than double that time, both being decades old to begin with. It may have been the vibrations of cycling with the Pen EE-3 in a case attached to my belt over the course of the few months I used it last year that caused the lens-shutter unit to work loose; there are four screws visible inside the camera behind the lens which would appear to hold the lens-shutter assembly but all four of these are tight, so presumably the problem lies elsewhere, and I have yet to investigate further.

However, having shot with the camera for six months, and having explored a few aspects of using the Pen EE-3 which I had wanted to do to write a fuller post, it's worth making a few comments on a few specific aspects that I had wanted to write about. When I began to draft a post on the camera, I was unable to find a manual for the EE-3 online, which seemed odd for a camera produced for at least ten years, and in relatively high volume. The manual for the Olympus Pen EE2 is available; the EE-3 differed from the EE-2 only in the settings for the dedicated GN14 flash, in distance markings from 1 to 4 metres around the lens in a sequence that mirrors the aperture settings for a non-dedicated flash. I haven't used a flash with the camera very often, so it was not one aspect that I wanted to explore. Instead, one function of the camera that I wanted to test was that, due to how the 'electric-eye' exposure system works, it's possible to use this as an 'exposure lock': partially depressing the shutter release opens the aperture blades for the designated exposure before the shutter fires with the release pressed further. The three shots below in sequence demonstrate this: the first exposed for the sky, then the second shot with the camera pointed in the same direction, partially depressing and holding the shutter button before moving the camera down to take the shot, and then the third shot taken normally.

Olympus Pen EE-3 exposure lock test
Of course, it's also possible to override the automatic exposure by choosing a different ASA setting to over- or underexpose a shot, but knowing that the EE-3 essentially has an exposure lock may be useful in a number of scenarios. I also wanted to explore the limits of the fixed-focus lens. This is a D. Zuiko f3.5 28mm lens, which should give a reasonable depth of field at most aperture settings, dependent on the lighting conditions and the speed of the film. It is, however, set at a nominally hyperfocal distance, not at infinity. The manual to the EE-2 states that focus is from 1.5m/5 feet to infinity. At the time the Olympus Pen EE-3 was produced, most users would be receiving 6x4-inch lab prints from their negatives, and any softness to the focus would be within acceptable limits at this scale. In revisiting the Olympus Pen EE-3, looking through photographs taken with both cameras I've used, I did wonder whether the current camera I have had started to develop problems sooner than I realised; when I had my first EE-3 in the late 1990s, I almost entirely relied on lab prints (I did develop a few rolls myself when I first bought the camera, but only printed contacts in the darkroom). Having developed the first roll of film from the EE-3 in February 2020, having not used the camera for a few years, I was a little more circumspect about the subjects I was photographing, and did choose to photograph things a bit closer to the camera than I might otherwise have done (of course, this wasn't exclusively the case, but it did make me consider taking a step or two closer in a number of circumstances). Aside from any focus issues the camera may have had, when using the camera last year, I bought a close-up filter for the camera, which halved the set focus distance to essentially 0.75m or a little under three feet. Apart from a couple of tests, I didn't have time to utilise the close up filter, but this may be a useful accessory to have.

Top frame with close up filter; bottom frame without
In preparing this post, I did scan a number of negatives shot with my first EE-3; comparing the scans, and being aware of the limitations of the resolution of flat bed scans, perhaps the second EE-3 was always a little off in its focus before the lens became loose: notably, the four screws inside the camera behind the lens look to have been painted black by hand, which suggests the camera may have been worked on in some time in the past before I bought it. However, my appreciation of the results from my second camera have always relied on scans from negatives in comparison with physical prints from the first camera, and seeing these enlarged on a computer screen invites greater scrutiny than a 6x4 print. At the time, most labs coped fine with the half-frame format; I did make sure to inform them that the film was half-frame when handing it in, and almost always got full-sized prints: on just a couple of occasions, with the very first colour film, and one other, the labs returned two frames to a print (the first lab then guillotined the prints in half, making a stack of seventy-plus small 3x4-inch prints). In scanning the negatives, there were a few examples when keeping two frames together as a diptych made some kind of sense, and it's a popular form for half-frame scans online.

Olympus Pen EE-3 with unbranded colour negative film
Although the use of the half-frame format was economical with film, I seem to remember most labs charging per print on their standard processing charges over 40 prints (allowing, I imagine, for the vagaries of 36-exposure films, with some cameras able to squeeze in a few extra frames); this was probably still cheaper overall than the cost of two 36-exposure films and their development in order to get 72 frames. I mostly seem to have used Fuji Superia 200, occasionally 400. Some of the negatives do not appear to have a brand name in the film rebate, and possibly came from Boots or Superdrug rather than a named manufacturer.

With my first Olympus Pen EE-3, generally using colour film and lab processing, I don't remember being concerned with the photograph's grain being more pronounced on the smaller negative size; with my second camera, choice of film and developer became a consideration. Last year's first roll through the camera, Double-X, is a relatively fast film, nominally 250 ISO in daylight, and when I first used Double-X I did find it to be quite grainy for its speed. However, the film I shot in the EE-3 last year was developed in D96 which gave a much smoother appearance to the grain than other developers I've used. For much of the time I shot with the EE-3 last year, I had a roll of Agfaphoto APX400 in the camera; the fact that the EE-3 stops down to f16 in automatic does mean that even a 400 ISO film is unlikely to be overexposed at 1/200th, unless in especially bright conditions, unlike earlier models of the EE range - the original Pen EE in its first iteration had a single shutter speed of 1/60th and a more limited range of ASA settings (although for most films excepting transparency, this would still be within a reasonable range of latitude); as far as I'm aware, unlike the red flag that prevents exposure at low light, the EE cameras do not have overexposure prevention (as an aside, the underexposure prevention means that when the camera is in its case, this works as an effective lock against accidental exposure). Curiously, the EE-3 does have an f22 aperture setting, but this is not used in automatic mode according to the Olympus Compact Cameras brochure, which gives the EV Range at ASA 100 from "EV 8.32 (f2.8, 1/40 second)" through to "EV 17.14 (f16, 1/200 second)."

In my initial post, I summarised the Olympus Pen EE-3's specifications thus:

The Pen EE3 model came out in 1973 and was produced for a decade. It has a fixed-focus 28mm f1:3.5 Zuiko lens, which equates to 40mm in full-frame 35mm format. Exposure is controlled by a selenium cell meter surrounding the lens that matches aperture to one of two shutter speeds, either 1/40th or 1/200th. ASA (ISO) settings run from 25 to 400, and the camera has a hot shoe and PC socket for use with an external flash. If there is insufficient light, a red indicator appears in the viewfinder, and the shutter won't fire. There isn't much scope for manually overriding the automatic exposure, except by turning the film speed ring away from the ASA settings: there are distance markings from 1 to 4 metres for the dedicated GN14 flash, or aperture numbers for a generic flash. Without a film speed selected, the shutter defaults to 1/40th of a second for flash sync.

As mentioned earlier, but not noticed at the time I wrote my original post, it is also possible to override the automatic exposure by using the effective exposure lock function. Having researched further into the EE-3, there is more information online now than in 2011, but I've seen as a result that some inaccuracies appear to circulate, specifically with regards to the shutter speed setting: there are statements that the shutter is set to 1/200th when the ASA settings are used, and the 1/40th speed is only used when turned to the aperture settings for flash. Although I haven't been able to find a manual for the EE-3, the EE-2 manual states that on Auto (the ASA settings), the programmed EE system gives 1/40th or 1/200th depending on the available light. Further, there is a scan of a brochure showing the then-current range of Olympus compact cameras which features the EE-3: this explicitly states "1/40 or 1/200 on AUTO, 1/40 on MANUAL"; presumably, there is a tendency for incorrect information to be copied from one online instance to another, both in how the automatic shutter speeds work, and also what these speeds are.

Olympus Pen EE-3 with unnamed colour negative film
When looking through the colour negatives from using the camera when I first had it, I was surprised at how well the camera performed in low light; I mostly used 200-speed negative film, which would have good latitude, and some of these were no doubt shot either with making sure there was a bright light source within the frame to enable the shutter to fire, or simply using the flash setting at 1/40th on the widest aperture setting, f3.5, and hoping the film's latitude would provide an image on the negative. With 72 shots on a roll of 36 exposures, it hardly feels a waste of film to try this.

Olympus Pen EE-3 with Fuji Superia 400
In summary, I still consider the Olympus Pen EE-3 to be ideally suited to the function of a snap-shot film camera, with all the economies of the half-frame format, perhaps more pertinent now with film prices, the battery-less 'electric-eye' selenium meter controlling the exposure, and the fixed-focus lens, that, for most situations, means that using the camera is, as I wrote ten years ago, simply about framing. In addition, with a little careful consideration of the camera's quirks and limitations, it's possible to use the Olympus Pen EE-3 with a bit more control over its (admittedly simple and effective) near-fifty-year-old automatic nature.

Olympus Pen EE-3 with Kentmere Pan 100
Olympus Pen EE-3 with Ilford FP4 Plus
Olympus Pen EE-3 with Ilford FP4 Plus rated 200
Olympus Pen EE-3 with Ilford FP4 Plus rated 200
Olympus Pen EE-3 with Eastman Double-X film
Olympus Pen EE-3 with Fuji Superia 200
Olympus Pen EE-3 with unbranded colour negative film
Olympus Pen EE-3 with Fuji Superia 400
Olympus Pen EE-3 with Konica 400
Olympus Pen EE-3 with Ilford HP5 Plus
Olympus Pen EE-3 with Ilford HP5 Plus
Olympus Pen EE-3 with Ilford XP2 Super

Sources/further reading: