The beauty of digital photography is that once you’ve paid for the camera and memory, you can take as many photos as you want for essentially no extra cost. Of course, on the other hand, when it comes to film photography, each press of the shutter button incurs an additional cost. So a film camera that promises to double the number of photos you can take with each roll sounds pretty tempting. This neat video will show you one such camera.
Coming to you from Willem Verbeeck, this great video introduces the Olympus Pen F. First introduced in 1963, the Pen F is called a “half-frame camera”, meaning it takes a standard 35mm frame and splits the frame by vertically centered, turning one 36x24mm Frame into two 18x24mm portrait frames (quite close to modern APS-C sensors). Doing so also changes the aspect ratio from 3:2 to 4:3. Doing this turns a roll of 36 exposures into 72 exposures, doubling the distance of the roll. Of course, this also has limitations, such as reduced image quality due to smaller frames, but it’s still a pretty clever implementation and a lot of fun to shoot. Check out the video above for the full recap from Verbeeck.
