I was doing some prop hunting with my art direction teacher this weekend. We visited an extremely run-down junk store. The quiet and almost toothless proprietor took us into a side room and showed us a box full of old cameras. Most of them were broken Polaroids, but down at the bottom was one of these little beauties.

The Olympus Pen-EE was first produced in 1961. It’s a half-frame camera, which means it shoots only half a frame of 35mm film at a time. The man at the junk store let me buy it for eight dollars. considering these types of models seem to be going for between fifty and a hundred dollars on ebay, I got a good deal!

The Pen-EE is one of the earlier automatic exposure cameras. When set on automatic it uses a selenium meter placed in a honeycomb-like array around the lens to decides the aperture. This is what camerapedia.org has to say about selenium meters:

“The electric parts of such a meter are an electromagnetic measuring instrument which is connected to anode and cathode of a selenium photo cell that produces more or less electric power when exposed to more or less light. The optical part of such a meter is a window in front of the photo cell’s light sensitive side. The window’s surface is usually structured like a honeycomb made of convex lenses. This type of window helps to bundle the light coming from the direction to where the photo cell is directed. The mechanical part of a selenium meter is an analog calculator which accepts exposure value and film speed as input parameters for showing the possible aperture/shutter speed combinations for correct exposure.”

I find this all so fascinating! It’s so cool to find almost 50 year old technology that still functions today without batteries. And my new camera definitely still functions. When I set it to auto and try to take a picture in a dark room, it flashes a little orange gel in the viewfinder and it won’t snap a picture. Definitely an outside point-and-shoot. I can’t wait to shoot a roll!

I think I have a minor case of Mr. Toad Syndrome. I’ve been told that symptoms of this disease include a constant changing of pursuits, an incurable obsession with the current pursuit being pursued, and a total rejection of old pursuits in favor of new ones. Luckily, symptom three has yet to strike. Though I do burn through a lot of random hobbies, at least I hold onto to every one I acquire to some degree. My newest pursuit is toy cameras. This website got me hooked.

Toy cameras are generally vintage cameras from the fifties and sixties that are made of plastic. They have plastic lenses, often use medium format film, and come in a bewildering variety of shapes and sizes. Just type “toy camera” into an ebay search. You’ll see what I mean. The most loved and adored toy of toy camera users is the Holga, a late bloomer that has tons of awful deficiencies including vignetting and light leaks. All these flaws culminate in a wonderfully distorted, dream-like image that is extremely addicting to shoot and collect. I was considering buying one when a friend offered to give me one of his old “toys.”

Introducing the Six Twenty Sunbeam, an off-brand TLR camera manufactured in Chicago.

Twin Lens Reflex cameras are really neat, both to look at and to use. The smaller bottom lens takes the picture. The larger top lens capture the image aimed at and projects it onto a ground glass on top of the camera. Kind of a primitive LCD screen.

The upside, or downside depending on how you look at it, is that you have to hold the camera below your face and look down to take a picture. I think it’s a blast!

I’m still cleaning up this old and slightly damaged camera. I’ll get some film for it soon and post some pics once I get them developed. Whoo hoo, what an absolutely glorious, scrumtuous way to take photographs! Toot toot!

My Grandpa recently passed away. After the funeral we were looking through shoeboxes full of his old photos and I couldn’t help noticing a response I kept having. I was fascinated by all the photos of people, wether I recognized them or not, but whenever I would come to a pile of nature shots, or vacation photos full of architecture and tourist attractions, I would impatiently flip through them until I encountered more human faces.

My photography teacher stressed this principle to me back in freshman year, but I was still surprised to discover it for myself: human interest is key. No matter how interesting you think a building or an animal or a tree is now, the only pictures that will count in the future will be of people. People are important to us. If we know them in the present, we will be fascinated by their younger selves. If we don’t know them, we will be filled with curiosity: who were they? What were they like. Photos we take of ourselves today will help inform people tomorrow of how we lived.

I was struck by this cultural aspect while looking at old picture of my Grandma’s father and his family who immigrated from Sweden. They were lively and loved sport; the girls played ukuleles, the boys wore their dapper American suits and coats proudly. I never had the chance to meet these descendants of mine, but by looking at their lives in photographic print, I have a connection to them that I would otherwise never have had.

In this digital age we have a great opportunity to capture our lives for the future. Digital cameras give us better quality and greater quantity, but there is now a much greater danger of losing our precious pictures to the ravages of time and constant upgrading technology. As long as we vigilantly watch our hard drives for signs of crashing and always, always copy our digital photos to new and better storage means, we should be fine, but I still think the best way to preserve memories is in a shoebox.