Yesterday evening as I was sorting through my vintage camera collections and storing some models away, I found that my Olympus Trip 35 was loaded with a mostly exposed film which I must have started when I first obtained the camera. Rather than put the camera away with a part exposed film still in it, I took the last few exposures (about 4) around the house and developed the film. This post therefore shows the Olympus Trip 35 sample pictures from my first film.
Since I have some stock ID11 developer made up, I used that in a 1+1 mix and developed for 10 minutes at 22 °C followed by Ilford rapid fixer at 1+9, also for 10 minutes. In order to check how much fixing time was needed, I used the old trick of putting the film leader (which I cut off before loading the film in the tank) into the fixer to see how long it took to clear.
The film in the camera was FP4+ which was exposed at the box speed of 125 ASA. The resulting negatives were then scanned on my Epson V550 perfection scanner as 48 bit colour scans and converted to black & white in Lightroom.
Olympus Trip 35 sample pictures
The negatives were a bit thin and about 1/2 a stop under exposed, which I corrected in Lightroom using the development module basic panel controls. I also converted them to black & white and added a bit of noise reduction and sharpening, as well as increasing the contrast slightly.
As can be seen from the scans above, there are some serious watermarks on the film. I don't like to wipe the film with my fingers when it first comes out of the tank for fear of scratching the emulsion, but that does leave the danger of large drying marks. I think I need to try to find a pair of rubber bladed negative wipers on eBay.
When I initially took a look at them, I was a bit disappointed with the quality of the pictures from the Trip 35. Some have a bit of vignetting, and some seem to be a bit soft, but on reflection I think I was being too harsh. In many of the cases where the image is soft I think it's probably that I've not accurately estimated the focus, and although I'd always thought of it as a really good quality small camera with a super lens, in reality the Trip 35 it is a reasonable quality snapshot camera. It's also the case that the pictures were taken in the winter time with a medium speed film, so on a lot of the shots the aperture was probably fully open.
So really, taking into consideration the age and spec of the camera, the results are not too bad at all.
