Olympus Pen EE 2 half frame

[Niner]

I never had a half frame before so I put a bid in on this pig in a poke half frame made from 1968 until sometime in the mid 70's. The Olympus EE 2. It has an auto feature that can pick a shutter speed that is limited to slow 40 or fast 200, and couple it with some selection of aperture..... so I read online from sites that profess to know....and a selection of F stops from 3.5 to 22 are available in manual mode . The auto feature is done by setting the ASA scale to the speed film you have. And.. .it all works.. or did work.. on selenium power. Selenium is somewhere between kryptonite and radio active isotopes. Not really. Probably it's more like a crystal radio set. When a shot is attempted without flash and there is too little light of the camera's selection it pops up a red flag and won't allow you to fire the shutter.

The selenium cell was pretty reliable and from what I read has a long actual life. The problem is that the camera connections get dirty, rusty wire, come undone, get damaged in some way or something else connected to them fails. This camera seemed to be doing the flag read right so I trusted most of a roll to the set 100 speed and let the camera do the thinking using the film speed dial. However.... it must have been asleep because the camera selections produced unusable negatives.

Today, I did all select myself from the orange numbered F stop selections with no ASA set and hooked up a Cannon 200E speedlite to see what would happen with flash. I took shots with different apertures with the flash and made notes as I went. I then did the same with no flash in back yard daylight.

One thing with half frame is that you can take multiple shots of the same scene with different apertures without wasting any film... 72 shots on a 36 exposure roll offers plenty of latitude for multiple shots in the hope that one is better than another.

So.. all the shots came out except with a couple of the small aperture shots....F 11 seemed to not be reliable. There wasn't a lot of focus difference between 3.5 and 22 because the lens is fixed focus and has an aim point of probably about 15 feet away. With a wide 28 mm lens the depth of field is pretty inclusive at whatever F stop.

I discovered that with flash, although several different F stops will grab a full frame, that the 8 f stop is most in sink with the flash I was using.

The biggest problem I had was loading the 72 exposures on the developing reel. I did it in the dark bag and had to reload it three times and managed to still not get it altogether right and got some finger prints on the negative that won't wipe off.

It's all an adventure of my second childhood. And .. I only have $20 total in the camera....so it's cheaper than most of my fishing tips.