The Trip 35

The Trip 35 was way ahead of its time. As in lightyears, and in a few ways it's actually far better designed than a lot of far more expensive and modern cameras. Take, for example, the way it powers its meter - a selenium cell, or in slightly less geeky terms, a solar panel. That's right, a camera which was originally designed more than 30 years ago powers a fully automatic exposure system through the only power source that's unlikely to run out. Plus, you wont accidentally have it go off in your bag, wasting precious film, because it will refuse to trip the shutter (nice terrible pun, eh?) if there isn't enough light reaching the aforementioned selenium cell/solar panel. Clever Olympus.

This camera is riddled with nice little touches like this, like the oddly named 'judas-window' in the viewfinder, which allows you to see where you've put the zone focus and the aperture ring without having to take your eye away from the viewfinder, or the inclusion of eyelets on both sides of the camera, so our south paw friends needn't go without a wrist strap.

To think that Olympus managed to create a camera with no battery dependency, which could probably be used by someone who had never even picked up a camera before with little trouble. Just set the aperture to A (for automatic), set the focus to the red group (which sets the camera to its hyperfocal distance), and shoot. Brilliant.

But that isn't to say that this camera is solely for people who aren't really photographers, or to put it another way, overly simplistic. No, this camera actually has a few traits which bely its ability to be used as quite a serious, albeit simple and unobtrusive photographic tool. Why do you think David Bailey used one?

The first of these is the scalpel-like lens. This is better than a lot of the modern, expensive Nikkor glass I use, and is able to hold its own even against the sharper members of my Nikkor herd, including the legendary 55mm f/3.5 Micro-Nikkor and the 17-55mm f/2.8 Nikkor AF-S. The results really have to be seen in print to be believed, considering it is a) A 30 odd years old design and b) was mounted on what was intended to be a mass market camera.

The next is the inclusion of the hyper-focal marking, albeit rather subtly. This is quite a rarity nowadays, and I must confess it took me a while to work out why Olympus marked one focus point differently to all the others. Now I now, and so do you. Remember it if you use one of these brilliant little things, as it is key to what I reckon this camera is best put to use as.

"Which would be?"

Street-shooting.

This camera has all the traits necessary to create a truly legendary street camera. It's unobtrusive (especially in the increasingly rare, but oh-so-sexy black finish) because of its leaf shutter, it runs at a constant shutter speed of 1/60 or 1/200 (depending on whether you set the aperture manually, which is supposedly for flash, or leave the camera in A mode) which is fast enough to slow most action, whilst ensuring a smallish aperture is set during daylight, guaranteeing the success of the hyperfocal focussing technique. The choice of a 40mm lens means that shooting from the hip isn't as ridiculous a prospect with regards to composition as it is with other cameras (I personally don't really enjoy shooting from the hip, I'm too much of a control freak, and I don't really enjoy wasting film). It's light, and never needs the batteries replacing, so if you miss a shot, it's your fault rather than the camera's. And they're cheap and plentiful, so you don't have to worry about losing/dropping it.

This thing is simply brilliant, and it isn't half a handsome beast. If I'm leaving the house, this thing is probably in my bag, because even if you're not going out with the express intention of taking photos, you can never tell when an opportunity for an excellent image will present itself. The Trip means you need never miss that opportunity, if you're lucky enough to catch it, that is.