Jim Simon photography

Film Photography and some other stuff, you'll see


Olympus Trip 35



Now, believe it or not, I feel this is the best camera I own. Not because it gives me the sharpest negs (though it pretty much does), or offers sophisticated solutions to tricky situations, but it does give me the best photographs I take - because it's the camera that allows me to record what I see. What I mean by this is that there is almost no barrier between a situation I see and then pressing the shutter. There's practically no focusing, no metering; just framing if there's time or, often, just point and shoot. And then, when I come to work with the images all the detail's there, the exposure's spot on - it's almost too easy and feels like cheating. I have one Trip for colour, one for black and white and a spare for the future because I dropped what was then my only Trip on some marble steps in Urbino a year or so back, and it was then that I realised how much I had come to rely on my Trip. I had my Leica M2 with me then, too, so I was able to continue to take photos, but the character of the images changed for the rest of the holiday; the M2 is slow to use, involves getting bits and pieces out (meter etc.), requires deliberate focusing and completely altered what I brought back. It's the spontaneous photograph that the Trip allows, and then, when one gets home, the negs are all great as if one had taken a long time over getting it right.



Olympus Trip 35 | HP5 | Neat Perceptol



Olympus Trip 35 | Tri-X | HC-110

Sharp, instant, no barriers. See subject - take photo. And it will be correctly exposed and printable as long as the focus is good, and it soon becomes second nature to just be right.



Olympus Trip 35 | Tri-X | HC-110

There's also a perfectly handy way of forcing a picture to be taken even when the selenium cell meter says no. Roll the flash ring over to f2.8 and it'll force an exposure at 1/40th sec. It's up to you to determine if there's enough light in your subject to allow a non-flash exposure to happen, but just give it a go - why not? In this example above the outside conditions were d-a-r-k dark and the red flag was popping, but the interior of the shop looked to me like there'd be something there, so I took the photo and am glad I did. It's my tribute to Hopper's "Nighthawks"!​



The Trip is an automatic camera - at least it offered what passed for automation when it was introduced - but many users look at the f-stops shown on the ring around the lens barrel and deduce that they can simply rotate that ring and the camera will switch to manual. Hmm... Not so. I've even read reviews and seen YouTube videos that say the Trip can be used in manual mode by doing this - after all it's got those f-stops all marked out, hasn't it?

Aside: to be comprehensive about this, there are a very few Trips that have been converted, permanently and exclusively, to a very restricted manual mode in which the meter and red flag have been disabled and the shutter speed is limited to just 1/200th sec. I don't see the attraction of this at all. For a start the fact that Trips use a 1/40th sec. shutter speed from f2.8 to f8 maximises the available resolution of the lovely lens by retaining the slower shutter speed for a good long time as the light increases. Secondly, a modified Trip's setting for the lowest ambient light is f2.8 at 1/200th, and this is roughly 2.5 stops less useful than 1/40th at f2.8 if you're trying to take a photo in lower light. Moreover, a stock Trip would be using an aperture of around f7 at its 1/40th sec. shutter speed before a converted Trip could even start to take photos at f2.8. Why would you strangle a Trip like this? Well, the argument is that you can, with this "total control", use films faster than 400 asa, and you can steer towards wider apertures in order to deploy a shallower depth of field. Tempted? I wouldn't touch one of these with a bargepole, though I might with a baseball bat. I wouldn't want to lose any of the capacity for a lens to give of its best and I wouldn't want to only be able to start taking photos after breakfast (light).

Besides, one can do something about all this business with a standard, unmolested, normal, run of the mill, uncastrated Trip.


You can take control.



Let's "manualise" the trip!



Many Trips are picked up by people who are new to film photography, and a Trip is a great place to start. It is a very capable automatic camera, but whilst many just stick it on "A" for automatic and run with it, there are ways of maxing out the quirks of its design to great advantage. But, one thing it is not, and that is a manual camera; the presence of those lovely little f-stops on a ring around the lens just makes you think it is, much like an Olympus OM maybe. So, I'm going to explain the "flash ring" as I call it. It isn't complicated, but it is quite involved. If you aren't too worried about the intricacies then take my advice; just leave the camera set to "A" until the red flag pops up, and then if you think there's a photo but the flag's up, roll the flash ring round to f2.8 and you'll do fine. That's it. Move on. However, for the intrepid Tripper up for the journey - let's keep on going...


The flash ring was designed to allow the Trip to be used, unsurprisingly, with flash. A simple appropriate flash unit would know its output and would ask you the distance to the subject and then, from a table, give you an f-stop to set your camera to for a given speed of film. The shutter speed doesn't really matter because the intention is that the illumination would all be taken care of in the brief moment the flash occurred. A Trip syncs at 1/40th sec. which is plenty of time to guarantee that the shutter would be open whilst the flash did its work. So, what happens when you turn the flash ring from "A" for automatic?


  • The flash ring disables the red flag and forces a 1/40th sec. exposure regardless of the ambient light. Well, you want that with flash, don't you?
  • When the flash ring is moved from "A" the meter is still active. The meter continues to set the aperture for the ambient light. Now, if you're using flash you don't want an ambient light reading to set the iris - you want the iris to be correct for the light you're going to get from the flash gun. What you need is a means of overriding the aperture an ambient light reading would suggest. Aha!
  • The f-stop settings on the flash ring dictate the widest aperture beyond which the iris will not open. The flash ring limits the opening of the iris in order to stop it opening to, say, f2.8, when you know you want an f-stop of, say, f8 for a flash exposure.


Using this knowledge you can, with a bit of thought, even contrive fill-in flash exposures by working with ambient light and flash, but that's another area altogether and something I've never got into because I don't like flash. I see the point for press work or whatever, but unless you really know what you're doing and can proof your images with something like Polaroid (or digital of course) to my eyes casual results tend towards a degradation of that which attracted me to the subject in the first place.


So why use the flash ring at all?

There are several reasons, the obvious one being that you may, indeed, be using flash!

Moving on; I've explained that even when the flash ring is turned from "A" the meter is still active and does set an aperture relevant to the ambient light. Set the flash ring to, say, f4, and the iris will be set anywhere between f22 and f4. And if you only roll the flash ring round one click to f2.8 (the lens' maximum aperture), the meter will set the aperture just as it would if it were set to "A" with all f-stops available. You can try it; go outside, move the flash ring round that one click to f2.8 and point the camera at something bright like the sky, and you'll see if you half press the shutter that the iris doesn't open right up even though you've set the flash ring to the widest setting. This is not a manual camera.

Now, where the response with the flash ring deployed does differ from that when set to "A" is that the aperture will be set as if 1/200th sec. shutter speeds were available, but only 1/40th sec. is. So, with the flash ring set to f2.8, the camera will expose as normal at 1/40th sec. accurately using apertures from f2.8 to f8 just as if you'd left the it set to "A". However with more light it all falls apart because as the ambient light increases the meter continues to set the iris as if the shutter speed has moved up a gear to 1/200th sec. but it hasn't - it's still going to fire at 1/40th sec. and so this would lead to over-exposure, but who cares? This is pretty useless information; it's just a description of what happens. The great thing is that it doesn't matter a hoot. If there's that much light why would you not have the camera set to "A" in the first place? What are you, some sort of dummy?

Just to get a couple of things out of the way before we get to the only reason I ever use the flash ring;

  • You may be intending to force an under-exposure for some reason. You may have a darker sky and a bright close subject such as a lit face, but without a meter this can be hard to get right. You could spot-meter the face and decide you want to expose using f5.6 at 1/40th. But, with the meter largely reading the background sky, it might be dictating an exposure of f2.8 at 1/40th. Take the picture like this and the face would be over-exposed. So you could set the flash ring to f5.6, the iris would only open to f5.6 and you'd be good. This is broadly the same situation as when using a flash unit of course; a closer subject is brightly lit and you don't want to over-expose. But I'd say this kind of faffing is taking you away from the sort of situation for which a Trip is best suited.
  • You may want to force a slower exposure than 1/200th in good light. You want movement-blur, say. You'd risk over-exposure if the ambient light was such that the camera would otherwise have switched up to a shutter speed of 1/200th sec. and you'd have to take the consequences, but there you go. It's possible.

Neither of the above two scenarios are much in the way of what the designers had in mind. I know that, but here some the two great big wonderful chance happenstances of design that comes with every Trip. Here we go:


Forcing an exposure in the dark. This is the only reason I ever take the Trip off "A". Ever.

It's not hard; you want to force an exposure when the red flag’s telling you that you can’t. You have a reason to believe that what is there in front of you would make a good photograph, but, darn it! the red flag's popped up and the shutter mechanism is locked! The camera and its red flag may be right; there may not be enough light to make a perfect exposure, but there in front of you is, say, a dark corridor and a lit figure at the end in the light, or a shaft of light in a dark church, or someone peering at you out of the gloom, or a lit shop window at night etc. etc. and you want to take that picture but the camera won't let you! What have you got to lose? Slide the flash ring to f2.8 (and only to f2.8) and the camera will expose for 1/40th sec. at f2.8. Job done. The picture may not turn out to be quite what you saw in your mind’s eye, but it's surprising what you can get with, say, a 400asa film exposed at 2.8 for 1/40th sec. I've had many pictures come my way like this even though the red flag said nothing was there, and here the latitude of negative film additionally plays into one’s hands. The above shop in the dark is one example, but I've got loads.

But what if, actually, you got it all wrong and there was actually more ambient light than you thought and the correct exposure would be 1/40th at f5.6? (forget that the red flag wouldn't have popped up; you may have just decided to go for the flash ring without checking to see if you needed to). No worries; don't forget the meter's always active - it would see f5.6's worth of light and only close as far as f5.6 even if you’d set the flash ring to f2.8. All good.


Exposure Lock. The designers probably didn't so much create this feature for us photographers to exploit, rather they couldn’t help but include it because of the mechanical nature of the design. It's the old half-press of the shutter button to lock in a meter reading until you either release the shutter-pressure or press it down all the way for an exposure. Now this is how you create a manual camera – nothing to do with the flash ring! It just works.

Examples: Bright sky, dimmer foreground. If you simply hold up the camera on the horizontal, because you want sky and foreground in the frame, and press the shutter you'd have the classically under-exposed foreground in the final photograph. Yes, you can dodge and burn your way out of it later on, either in the wet darkroom or the digital equivalent, but it is sub-optimal given what detail there may or may not be available in the areas you want. So wouldn’t it be great if one could take a reading, accurate for the subject area you want to have in the centre of your film's range, and store it - allowing you to re-frame and expose at that retained meter reading? Wouldn’t that be good - and the Trip does this perfectly. Point the camera down to take the sky out of the selenium cell's field of view, or point the camera behind you away from the incoming light, and then half press the shutter, re-frame with as much sky in the shot as you want, and then press down all the way for an exposure placed where you want; bright sky and sufficient mid-range detail in your chosen subject area.

You can even use this exposure lock facility in the lit face/dark background example in the section above; go up to the subject so the light from the face is filling the selenium cell with reflected light (or take a reading from your hand if the light's the same where you are as it is on that face), trap the meter, step back and take the shot; the sky will be dark and the subject, within reason, more or less successfully exposed. It may not be perfect, but it'll work better than doing nothing.

One important thing to remember is that the selenium cell takes a second or so to respond accurately to light, so rather than just grab quick readings, do give the meter a chance to give you the right exposure before you hold it. The same goes for the Trip’s use in general photography too, of course.


The Trip is an automatic camera, and you can treat it as such and just go out with it on “A” all the time. Many just do that and it's all great most of the time, but you really can max out what you can get from it. You can "manualise" it to great effect, but you can not turn it into a manual camera. If only it had a decent lens on it… Oh, wait a minute - it has!