{"id":726,"date":"2010-10-20T15:57:06","date_gmt":"2010-10-20T04:57:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.arransalerno.com\/blog\/?p=726"},"modified":"2022-02-21T03:04:29","modified_gmt":"2022-02-21T03:04:29","slug":"olympus-om4-bessa-grip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arransalerno.com\/blog\/olympus-om4-bessa-grip\/","title":{"rendered":"Olympus OM-4 + Bessa Grip"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Some months ago I decided to get back into black and white shooting after spending about a year shooting colour on a p&amp;s. It&#8217;s always refreshing to have bit of a change, and whilst I don&#8217;t make a conscious effort to exclusively shoot on one medium or another, I&#8217;ve found that I&#8217;ll naturally stick with one or two cameras or types of film unless I make a conscious effort to mix things up a little. Whichever way I &#8220;mix things up&#8221;, I inevitably find myself returning to the OM series, or one of my rangefinders. I&#8217;ve tried other SLR systems over the last few years but they don&#8217;t feel as natural as the OM system to me (if you couldn&#8217;t already tell by the number of OM&#8217;s I have and use).<br \/>\nAnyway, I got this OM-4 for free after the previous owner told me it had electrical problems. It sat on my shelf until earlier in the year when I decided to find out once and for all if it was working. First step was to try and give it bit of a clean &#8211; the camera had come from someone who originally lived in the Northern Territory, so it was covered in that distinctive N.T red dirt\/dust. I couldn&#8217;t see any obvious problems so after sourcing a battery cover from a generous member at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rangefinderforum.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">RFF<\/a>, I put a test roll through it and to my surprise everything worked perfectly.<br \/>\nAfter a few days I was looking at my Bessa R3A and noticed how similar in size it is to the OM SLR&#8217;s. From this I eventually discovered that the Bessa grips fits on the OM4 (and others) with ease. The grip is actually a little bit big for the OM-4 (as the Bessa is larger), but it does the job pretty well. The ergonomics of the camera have improved somewhat and it doesn&#8217;t stand out visually too much or add any noticeable weight. It&#8217;s a bit ghetto I know, but I&#8217;m thinking it&#8217;ll give me more <em>street cred<\/em> now haha&#8230; Anyway, it was an experiment that worked well. I figured I&#8217;d try it after hearing people ask if it&#8217;s possible. Yes it is, albeit not perfect, however it does the job!<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-727 size-full\" title=\"Olympus OM and Bessa grip\" src=\"http:\/\/www.arransalerno.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/10\/om4vc.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"521\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some months ago I decided to get back into black and white shooting after spending about a year shooting colour on a p&amp;s. It&#8217;s always refreshing to have bit of a change, and whilst I don&#8217;t make a conscious effort to exclusively shoot on one medium or another, I&#8217;ve found that I&#8217;ll naturally stick with one or two cameras or types of film unless I make a conscious effort to mix things up a little. Whichever way I &#8220;mix things up&#8221;, I inevitably find myself returning to the OM series, or one of my rangefinders. I&#8217;ve tried other SLR systems over the last few years but they don&#8217;t feel as natural as the OM system to me (if you couldn&#8217;t already tell by the number of OM&#8217;s I have and use). Anyway, I got this OM-4 for free after the previous owner told me it had electrical problems. It sat on my shelf until earlier in the year when I decided to find out once and for all if it was working. First step was to try and give it bit of a clean &#8211; the camera had come from someone who originally lived in the Northern Territory, so it was covered in that distinctive N.T red dirt\/dust. I couldn&#8217;t see any obvious problems so after sourcing a battery cover from a generous member at RFF, I put a test roll through it and to my surprise everything worked perfectly. After a few days I was looking at my Bessa R3A and noticed how similar in size it is to the OM SLR&#8217;s. From this I eventually discovered that the Bessa grips fits on the OM4 (and others) with ease. The grip is actually a little bit big for the OM-4 (as the Bessa is larger), but it does the job pretty well. The ergonomics of the camera have improved somewhat and it doesn&#8217;t stand out visually too much or add any noticeable weight. It&#8217;s a bit ghetto I know, but I&#8217;m thinking it&#8217;ll give me more street cred now haha&#8230; Anyway, it was an experiment that worked well. I figured I&#8217;d try it after hearing people ask if it&#8217;s possible. Yes it is, albeit not perfect, however it does the job!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":727,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"single-no-separators","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,17,25,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-camera","category-olympus","category-techrepairs","category-voigtlander"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arransalerno.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arransalerno.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arransalerno.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arransalerno.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arransalerno.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=726"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/arransalerno.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/726\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1623,"href":"https:\/\/arransalerno.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/726\/revisions\/1623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arransalerno.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arransalerno.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arransalerno.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}