Today I wanted to talk about shooting multiple sequential frames of the same subject using half-frame cameras. It's perfectly natural to scan two neighboring half-frame exposures at the same time when you digitize your negatives, since the frame size of a normal 35 mm image is one of the standard settings on your scanner. Once you realize this, it's no great leap of logic to intentionally shoot pairs of frames of the same subject to present as a diptych. And of course, why stop at a diptych?
By the way, this camera is the sibling of the Olympus Pen-W made famous by Harold Feinstein early in his career (who used it to make many of his famous images of Coney Island). As a photographer, who isn't interested in the experience of shooting with the same gear used by some of the great artists who came before us?
The image pair below was made using an Olympus Pen FT camera and the standard 38 mm f/1.8 lens, both from the 1960s. In this case, the black bar in the center of the visual field is the actual strip of blank film separating the two images, and becomes a compositional element you can play with.
As the triptych landscape below illustrates, this approach also is a fun way to make a lo-fi panorama. No advanced photo editing necessary, or even desired, really. This particular series of photographs was made using the Olympus Pen S, an older half-frame design from the late 1950s. I had the original Olympus yellow filter mounted on the lens for these exposures, which helped, I think.
