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

I bought my first half frame camera earlier this year because I was looking for a way to simplify my daily camera kit and the Pentax 17 seemed to tick all the right boxes. Before that I had been carrying either a Pentax 110 auto or a Pentax ME and they are just too old and weird or too bulky to keep with me all the time. So half-frame solved a lot of issues at once. I got a much smaller and faster to use camera, a lot more exposures per roll compared to the ME, and a big step up in image quality and film choice compared to the 110.

Since I got the 17 I haven’t left home without it except for a few social media “week” events shooting a Holga or a folding camera or something like that. For now I’m a devoted Pentax 17 shooter but the format offers so much benefit for my daily photography I will probably end up with more in the future. 

What is it you like most about Half-frame?

I love how the format encourages you to shoot more frames, and how easy it is to keep these tiny cameras with you. Most of my previous film work was actually in medium format and while I love the clarity of those big negatives, they are expensive and the cameras are huge. With my little pentax I’m not going to run out of frames, it’s not going to be expensive to process, and the camera is tiny and unobtrusive. So I can shoot anything that catches my interest and I will always have my camera at hand when the light and subjects align. Shooting film in 2025 feels a lot like trying to take a road trip while google maps is just yelling at you to go to the airport cause flying would be faster. Half-frame makes it just a little easier to still choose to shoot analog.

Favourite subject and/or Half-frame photo?

I think my style for half frame is very slice-of-life. I tend to find little vignettes of whatever I’m doing that day. So I might go for coffee with my co-workers and end up photographing a neat concrete hallway, or catch a ferry at dusk and make a picture of another passenger looking at puget sound. I haven’t really done any big projects with the format, it’s just my constant photographic companion so each roll is full of all kinds of random unrelated pictures.  My favorites are mostly taken on ferries (I kinda love transit photography), or are random architectural details that just catch my eye for some reason. 

Your top tip/s for shooting half frame photos?

First, keep your camera with you, literally all the time! Half-frame cameras are generally pretty small and affordable, so stick that thing in your pocket or purse and have it at hand when a cool photo comes along. Second, and this is a hard one for me, lean towards finer grain slower films. This has been a big departure from my medium format work where I live on Tri-X 400. But the little Pentax does its best work for me with Ilford FP-4 or a fine grain color film like Portra. That setup helps me get the “biggest” pictures out of my little camera.