#olympus flex

Mamik. 120 Film. 

I got a new camera, and it's a bit of a rare one. TLRs with a 2.8 aperture seemed to be confined to expensive Rolleiflexes and big, bulky Mamiya C's. Enter the Olympus Flex, which started as Japanese Rolleiflex copies with their earlier models. These boasted 6 element lenses, but unfortunately seemed prone to fungus and other issues. Later, models have a Zuiko lens of Olympus' own inspiration though, and that's the one that I have. Since it's a new camera, I figured I'd put in a burner roll of film to make sure everything works.

My local camera shop had Holga 400 for $5.99, which is a couple bucks cheaper than even Ilford HP5+, which runs close to 7, so I figured Holga 400 is the same stuff as Fomapan, a nice standard black and white film which ought to play nice with Caffenol.

But no.

The film base was soooo dark and the results are chock full of grain. At first I thought the darkness was fog from underfixing, so I tried fixing again but to no avail. Maybe a 15 minute development time is too much.

I was still able to scan a good amount of information though, the histogram wasn't crushed like it was when I tried to push HP5+. I just feel like my scanner wasn't able to blast the back light through to the camera. I'm also trying a new scanning setup with a plane of glass on the bed instead of the stock Epson holder.

On the camera side, unlike the Autocord, this camera cocks the shutter and advances film separately. The result is that I sometimes forget to advance the film, and I get double (triple?) exposures like this. Towards the end of the roll I got used to advancing film right after I take a shot, and cocking the shutter right before I take the shot, so hopefully I can get used to that.

THE Donut Man. 120 Film.

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