Last month, for a bit of fun, I shot a roll of cheap film over the space of a week with my Mju:II. I kept the camera in my car and in my pocket most of the time just taking pictures of things that looked interesting. There’s nothing revolutionary about this concept, and I’ve been carrying cameras around with me for quite some time now. But there seemed something different this time. The fact that the camera only offered a limited amount of options to the user. No manual settings, no zoom, an auto focus, auto everything pretty much. Every other camera I own has manual settings, so I wasn’t sure how far I’d get with this automatic plastic fantastic Olympus. Also, I’d never used the camera before so thought it’d be a good opportunity to test it out.

To say I was happy with the results is an understatement. This little camera has now shot up the list of my current favourites. The lens is sharp, and i think the photos it produces (looking at the prints) has a distinct look. Its also very compact and strong. I was walking over rocks covered in moss once and managed to slip over (I’m normally not that clumsy). The camera was in my right hand, which took the full weight of my body when I fell over on the rocks. The camera survived with just one scratch, a lot better than me who managed to be bleeding from my arms and back =/ . The camera had this roll of film in it too, so I was worried at one point that the back may of opened, or something cracked letting light in, but everything was completely fine. I finished shooting the roll that day.
Photos were taken in the Sydney CDB and suburbs, quite often driving to or from things. There’s a night shot in Circular Quay where I just put the camera on a fence and let it select its own shutter speed which turned out perfect. There’s some other night ones where I turned on spot metering and turned the flash off.
Here are some shots.

Here is a more detailed review of this neat little camera.

Wow, two posts in one day. Go me.
I developed my first roll of film today. As I mentioned in a previous post, i’ve been thinking of trying out some black and white film developing for a while now. This week i got some gear and gave it a go.
I shot a roll on Agfa APX100 and developed it in Rodinal at 1:50 for 13 minutes, then used Ilford stop bath and fixer.
It was a pretty straightforward process, the hardest bit was starting, as I was worried about stuffing something up. In the end I did stuff something up, but it had nothing to do with the chemicals and timing etc. It was the fact that I stupidly hung my negatives to dry in a shower with a leaking head. So I got drips of water down the bottom of my strip of negatives. Some of the water marks dried out, but others didn’t. You always stuff up the shots you’re most interested in seeing don’t you… Well I do anyway.
The negatives that didn’t dry out are being re-soaked. Hopefully i can salvage some of them.
I was quite happy with the ones that did dry properly, so I scanned them in with my ancient scanner that magnifies grain and dissipates tonal range.
Here are a few shots that scanned ok.
They’re aren’t amazing, but I am more interested in seeing if I developed them correctly or not. I think they’re pretty close.
As you can tell in some of the shots, the light was incredibly harsh the day I took these…. One day I’ll be able to shoot in favourable light… One day.

Took the Olympus out the other day and shot a roll of C41 b&w I had lying around. The temperature was mid 30’s and not a cloud in the sky, so the light was REALLY harsh.
The SP functioned great. It’s a great camera to shoot with, really comfortable and easy to use. The only issue I had is that my light meter has bit of a mind of its own. It sometimes refuses to turn on when I take the camera out of its case. However when it decides to work it’s accurate.
This was predominately a test roll as I didn’t know if the camera would work. I didn’t even bother changing the light seals either, but they appear to be fine. The lens is super sharp and bokeh is nice and smooth. I have to get a proper film scanner now, I’m sick of scanning prints and getting results that don’t really reflect the quality of the negatives. Some of the shots turned out ok though I thought.

EDIT: 3 or 4 pics have been corrupted so have been removed and will be re-uploaded and posted shortly.