On Saturday, February 15th 2025, the Salt Lake City Photo Community organized a photowalk starting at Pioneer Park, going north by the Delta Center, back south through The Gallery to finally end up at the Findlab to celebrate their soft open of their location in Salt Lake City. I decided to bring some equipment that I barely use to see if I should keep it or pass it on to a new owner. On the analog side I loaded a roll of Ilford FP4 Plus into the Olympus Pen EE-2 that I had bought in a thrift store in the Netherlands a few decades ago. I had never used this camera or any other half frame camera. On the digital side I brought my Sony a7iv with two tilt shift lenses I still had from when I shot Canon and my small 35mm lens just in case the other options did not work out.
The walk started with some snow and an overcast bright gray sky, but there were still quite a number of people gathered for this second walk of the year. I had missed the last two, so it was nice to catch up with some regulars, and there were plenty of new faces as well.
I decided to give my self a little assignment: alternate the shots with the EE-2 between images containing people and ones not containing any people. This was a nice little exercise and made me look for shots more actively than I think I would have normally done. The experience with the EE-2 was totally new, in the beginning I had trouble finding the small viewfinder with my non-dominant eye and it was a fresh experience to hold the camera normally but still have a portrait view. Otherwise, it was real simple, just point and shoot, no option to focus and no need to adjust the exposure since it was bright enough for the 125 ISO film I had loaded.
I did take some shots to test the focus distance, as you can see in the shots above and below, the set focus is to infinity but the close subjects do not get blurred out too much. Definitely a usable composition method.
The experiment with the tilt shift lenses was a bit more involved. I still do not know what way the focus planes moves relative to how the lens is tilted, so it was a lot of trial and error. I started with the Mir 26b 45mm on the camera, this only has a tilt option, but that was plenty to have some fun with.
Being able to just drop the EE-2 in my pocket made it real easy to switch from one system to the other, and they were both easy to operate with my gloves on, a win at the beginning of the walk when the sun had not come out yet. Luckily the sun did come out less than an hour after we started, giving us some extra warmth and nice blue skies with some clouds. This also gave me a chance to channel my inner J.J. Abrams and investigate the limits of the Mir 26b.
To my surprise I completed the roll of FP4+ before the end of the walk. At that time I had replaced the Mir 26b with the Canon TSE 24 on my Sony a7iv and was playing around with tilt and shift. Completing the roll of 72 frames, when I normally have a hard time filling a roll of 36, shows how much freer I was taking the shots with the EE-2 than what I normally do when I shoot analog. Something to keep in mind next time I take my other more complex analog cameras out.
On the way home I stopped by Essential Photo Supply to get some Ilfotec DD-X, the only film developer I had was Rodinal and I thought it would not be good to use that on the half frame negatives. I am very happy with how they came out with the DD-X. And the playing with the tilt shift lenses also convinced me not to get rid of those, so no extra space in the equipment storage from this trip.
All in all very nice results from a days work!