The Olympus Pen F series of half frame cameras tick many boxes for me. They are beautiful examples of innovative industrial design and state-of-the-art engineering (for their time, certainly). They put the photographer at the center of the process of making images and the lenses produce spectacular results.
I was out for a walk toward the end of the day, and the Pen F was loaded with Kodak Ektachrome 100 slide film. I thought it would be interesting to use a fine grained film because of the small size of each negative in the half-frame format. That afternoon, I was noticing the contrast between the built environment and the trees in the landscape. I was using the normal lens, the 38 mm f/1.8 Zuiko.
Once I had the chromes scanned into my computer, I began to observe certain recurring relationships between pairs of images. Several of these groupings contained a significant amount of negative space, where the image itself fell into shadow to include the film rebate between two adjacent frames (which is black in slide film).
"I think of the will of the negative, and how I should respond to it", said Ralph Gibson who also said, "I prefer to have the shadows go completely black to produce strong shapes".
With these two ideas in mind, I decided to let the shadows go completely black to produce graphic forms that would help contrast the images of the trees with their more organic forms and textures, with the images of the buildings and chain link fence that are much more geometric and angular.
Yes, I'm very pleased with the results, especially the color rendition. I'm grateful that Kodak brought this emulsion back into production. Home developing really isn't that bad either.
