Olympus 35RC - A Reliable Camera

There are not too many small rangefinder cameras  that I have kept over the years.  I have fallen in and out of love with Canon QL-17s, Yashicas, Argus C4s, Zorkis, Retina IIas, Minoltas, and the Konica Auto S2.  None of them have had the reliability and compact size of my Olympus 35RC.  This camera was traded to me in 2006 by Ross Orr, for a M39 lens that I had.  Over the years, it has been used sporadically, but every time I use it, I have been pleased with the results, and the reliability of this shutter-priority  as well as fully manual compact rangefinder camera.  Perhaps the best review of this camera is on the Cameraquest website.  I am sure that my reading it long ago had me wanting one immediately.  If that isn't enough to interest you, this page is also very informative.

In March, I had the opportunity to travel to Yale University for a workshop.  I didn't want to bring a lot of gear with me, so I brought this camera, my Nikon 1J1, and a Yashica A TLR.  The Oly distinguished itself by taking excellent exposures in all situations, and when I felt I should override the meter and shoot manually, it was never a problem.  The camera isn't large, but it's also not so tiny as a Rollei 35,or an Olympus XA. The 42mm focal length is just fine, and the largest aperture of f/2.8 is not limiting for the kind of photography I do.  The top-mounted shutter speed dial is also well-placed. In short, a well-designed, fairly simple camera that does the job.    I'm going to have to remember to keep this camera in my backpack for everyday use.

Some color shots from expired Agfa 200 film:

Some shots from a roll of Kodak Tri-X

Photography of a Different Sort

The wonderful dinosaur mural at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History

My day job isn't that of being a photographer, although I do use photography in various forms to accomplish various tasks.  I am the Insect Division Collection Manager at the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology in Ann Arbor, MI.  Besides the 3.5 million specimens, we have various ancillary items such as photographs, transparencies, maps, journals, field notebooks, and other analog recordings that are part of the collection.  Last week I attended a workshop at Yale, under the iDigBio program.  The workshop, "Digitization of Source Materials" was intended to share information and provide a set of documents relating to the why and how we digitize (making non-digital items available digitally) our archives and non-specimen objects in our collections.  It is a different sort of protocols, as we want to be consistent in our workflows and end-products and the way we want people to access them.

1920s Photographic tools at Machu Pichu.  (YPMNH)

Consider a photograph.  You can digitize it by placing it on a flatbed scanner (easy) or by photographing it with a digital camera (usually more cumbersome).  Once you have it scanned, you need to add metadata that describes the image, catalog it so that the object is unique, and make it accessible via whatever software is used.  Think of uploading a photo to Flickr and not labeling or tagging it.  It would be hard to find again. Same thing for digital archives of any sort.  Now multiply that by potentially many thousands of items in a collection, with different origins (bound notebooks, photos, etc.,)  and you can see why some standards and protocols need to be addressed.

Various source materials at the Yale Peabody Museum

While at Yale, I was delighted to be able to see their digital imaging labs that are used by the museums there.  Imagine a large room with walls at 18% gray, a catwalk, and all the tables and lighting one may need to get the job done -- I was prcatically drooling.   Then, they showed us a machine with 2 cameras that allows them to photograph up to 1600 pages per hour -- automatically.  Very, very cool.

Book digitization at 1600 pages per hour.

Photography amounts to making an image on some recording surface, and whether it is film or a sensor is unimportant in terms of the technique in getting the object photographed.  The post-image work is certainly quite different, though.  It is the ability to do so many amazing things with digital images that makes the museum work so important.  We can share our resources with the rest of the world, and in doing so, we are making research on so many things much richer in content.

It was great seeing the wonderful work space at the Yale digital imaging studios.  Any photographer that shoots in a studio setting would love that space!

My dream studio at Yale

It was also good to see a university where scholarship is valued over athletics, substance over hype.   Okay, so you say it's Ivy league, not the Big "Ten".  The Big can't even count right.

Yes, that is a digital Hasselblad on the vacuum-base copy stand!

The Reflectance Transformation Imaging station.