What made you want to try half-frame, and what was your first half-frame camera?

I had just made a return to using Olympus digital cameras after a long stint with a full frame Nikon. The Nikon delivered performance I had needed for shooting community theatre work, but, the size and way it worked were never to my preference like my old Olympus E-3 had been so once the performance of the mirrorless OM-D E-M1 Mark II seemed up to snuff I switched back and fell in love with Olympus all over again. So I started reading more into the company history and their design philosophies, which included looking up more on the legacy of the “Pen” mark. During that period I read Yoshihisa Maitani’s special lecture series (https://www.olympus-global.com/technology/museum/lecture/vol1/) on some of this key Olympus designs, starting with the Pen, and became obsessed with trying one.

Accordingly, my first half-frame was a Pen, and I chose the Olympus Pen D2 for its f1.9 lens, unlinked meter, and manual exposure settings up to a proper 1/500 shutter speed.

What is it you like most about Half-frame?

My favorite thing about half-frames is the point-and-guess nature of most of them. Thanks to the unlinked meter on my Pen D2 it’s where I really started to learn light values and be able to guess exposure, and on most half-frames (since almost all are viewfinder cameras) you have scale focus at best so that’s always just a guess too. Like all film cameras, there’s no way to know if you were right at the time of capture, and I found that incredibly freeing. With a digital I’d keep iterating a scene until a shot was good, often leaving me disconnected from what was happening around me. With the half frame I learned to frame looser and make different exposure choices that would let me take a quick snapshot without removing me from the moment. And the sheer amount of frames meant there was no pressure from worrying I was ‘wasting frames.’ I could take guess or chances because there were still always so many more frames to use.

Favourite subject and/or HalF-frame photo?

In most cases my favorite subjects are portraits, and if I’m using my Pen F SLR that holds true there. For viewfinder half-frames, my favorites subjects are really just snapshots. “Notes from life,” I like to call them. Viewfinder half-frames really reward snapshot shooting, and that’s their routine use in my kit.

Your top tip/s for shooting half frame photos?

For all half-frames: learn to embrace the frame count as freedom, instead of a burden. Be experimental, take a few extra shots, stop asking “is this worth the film?” Your best shots usually happen when you take chances.

For viewfinder half-frames, specifically: use a faster film, stop down as much as you can, and frame from a little farther back. Do as much as you can to maximize the depth-of-field and you won’t have to worry too often about any mistakes scale focusing.