I got my OM-1 off the shelf the other week thinking that I haven’t used it for a while (since my holiday in Sorrento last summer, in fact) so I fired off a couple of shots just playing around and noticed that the mirror was staying up when the shutter was fired. I decided to investigate and discovered a partially used roll of Ektar still in the camera! Shutting the back as fast as possible, I quickly realised that this was the roll that I thought had gone missing at some point, clearly having forgotten that I’d loaded it on holiday and taken a few shots.
I decided that, given that the holiday shots were probably ruined, I might as well finish off the roll and see if I could resolve the shutter / mirror business. The same problem kept occuring intermittently, so I was sure that I was losing multiple frames – I’d have to wind on twice before the shutter would cock again – and expected them all to be blank.
What I actually ended up with was several frames that are badly out of focus where the camera had mis-fired in some fashion. All the other frames were ok, and even the holiday snaps hadn’t suffered much in the way of light-leak damage from the opened back (although most of them are nothing to write home about anyway). After removing the roll of film, I test fired the camera at multiple speeds, but couldn’t get it to re-occur. Loading a test film caused it to happen once or twice, but nothing like as much as before.
So I now have a roll of expired film in the camera to test it out properly. So far, fingers crossed, it’s been fine (12 shots in). Maybe the camera was sulking due to my inattention? 🙂
Here’s one of the shots from the roll of last year’s Ektar.
Olympus OM-1, F.Zuiko 50mm f/1.8 & Kodak Ektar.
Taken 3 August 2019
