So this here is an Olympus OM-1 film SLR camera. They were originally released in 1972
making them about the same age as Melbourne's Hitachi suburban trains
This one.. I don't know how old this one is but we assume early 70s so it'd be getting on
towards 50 years old, and this was my family's camera when I was growing up in the 90s. They were really
like an enthusiast level film SLR of the time they are made in Japan, built incredibly well and
you know 50 years on this camera has seen a lot of use it's spent a lot of time in
rough weather, bush walking, all sorts of things and it still functions perfectly fine. So I'm
not going to do a review - that seems a little bit pointless, this is more ah.. I'm just going to show
you how to use it basically. You might have an OM-1 that you found somewhere and you'd like to
give it a go, so I'm just going to explain the basic operation of it. Now some of my regular
viewers might think this is a little bit off-topic for this channel - however this was the first camera
I ever used, and I did use it to take some of my first railway photographs, so it does have a bit
of railway history behind it I suppose! So this one has got a 50mm 1.8 lens which was basically
the standard kit lens that these cameras usually come with. You can release the lens
like so. You can see a mirror there leading up to the pentaprism which is up the top
you don't have to be quite as careful with a film camera
not to get dust in there - obviously it's not a good idea - but with a digital camera when you do that
if dust goes in it can land on the sensor and cause enormous problems, whereas with a film camera
it's much easier to just blow dust out, so it's not super critical. First thing you probably
want to do is check - in case you don't know - you want to check if there's any film in there already
so this is where the film canister goes , underneath there, and on this side this is the
film winding on control and that's your shutter button to take a photo. It's really important
you don't open the back of the camera if you don't know if there's a film in there or not, because if
there is a film in there you're going to ruin it when you open it and expose it to the light
so to check we just try and wind this on. Now you can see it's actually not letting
me take it all the way there it's hitting a stop. That's because it wants me to take
a photo - so basically it alternates wind photo wind photo. So what I'll do is I'll take a photo
and that'll let me wind it on. And you can see this one here didn't move, so I'm gonna do that again
watching this - it stayed still, that means there's no film in there because if there was a roll
of film, when I pulled that forward that would rotate as well as I pulled the film through
so now we know there's no film in there it's safe to open the back. So this thing here
lifts up and then you pull it up one more time and the back pops open
so you can see here that's where the film canister goes, it pulls across and it winds into here
and it's quite safe to take a picture while this is open. So again find it forward
*click* you can very quickly see that happening there
now what we're going to do is load a film
What I've got here is a fujifilm 36 shot superior
200 ASA. ASA is just old people speak for ISO. It means the same thing. Usually on film
cameras it's called ASA and on digital cameras it's called ISO. Now what we do
we lift that up and the film sits in like that
now what we want to do you can see this thing here has got teeth and that is what engages with
those holes there. We're going to pull it gently out of the canister
and then this second one here has these slots in it, so what we're going to do is
feed the end of the film into one of those slots. All right, just wind that forward a bit
there you go now you can see it's started to wrap around there and those teeth
have engaged on the film there. Now you don't worry about it being totally engaged because when
we close the back it's going to push the film onto that. So first of all push that back down
and we'll close the back
now the first thing we have to do is wind it forward a bit because that film that was
visible will all be exposed to light.. because that's what we did
so we'll just take a couple of shots, maybe two
and I'm gonna wait to see this pick up some slack here
and it's not doing it
if i wind it back that should take the slack up a bit
here we go now it's engaged, so that's probably cost us a couple of photos in winding that on
but that's the way it goes with film, you don't do it because it's good.. you do it because it's old.
So I should say too - I really should have shown you this before I put the film in film in
the way to tell if your film has already been used or not is when I pulled it out it had that little
tab of film sticking out of the canister. That generally means it's unused. If you can't see that
tab, if it's fully inside the inside the canister then it probably has been used. So not definite but
that's the best way of telling. Now the first thing we have to do is tell the camera what ASA film is
in it, and that's just so that it knows, so the light meter knows what to tell us. And you can
see this dial here it says ASA. It's currently set to 400 it lines up with that tiny little
slot on the side of the shutter button. And we want to change that to 200 because we put a 200 film in
And I possibly have to push that down yep okay. So it's a fully manual camera
if you don't know how to shoot manual you'd best go and have a quick read up on shutter
speeds and apertures, but basically we've got two controls here, we've got the shutter speed ring
which is a little bit difficult to maneuver - it goes from very fast shutter speed - a thousandth
of a second at that end, right through to bulb mode which means if you hold the shutter down
it will stay open for as long as you hold it. So a normal good handheld shutter speed put it on
125th because we're using 200 ASA film it's not a very fast film so we won't be able to use a super
fast shutter speed. The other control we have here is the aperture which is on the lens itself
f1.8 wide open, lots of light but gives us really shallow depth of field
down to f16 which will make it quite dark and give us a very deep depth of field
now it also has a focusing ring it's this here focus is fully manual so you will have to focus
it before every picture. All right so we want to take a picture. First thing I want to do is make
sure we've wound it on. If it's doing that that means we're wound on. We're all good
now I'm just going to look through see if I can actually look through the viewfinder here
hmm kind of. Okay so this camera I'm filming on, the lens is too big to look through the
viewfinder so I'm just going to use my phone for this for a second, there we go
now you can see on that left hand side is the light meter
and at the moment the needle is pointing down, which just means that it's turned off
and above it you can see there's a negative and positive so first thing we need to do is turn on
the light meter which is this switch here, and it's the only electric part of this camera
if it doesn't work it probably means that you need to change the battery, there's a
small button battery in here which will last for years, but you've just got to remember
to turn that off to try and save battery power afterwards. It doesn't use a lot of power but
it will go flat eventually. So if we look through here now the light meter's turned on
it's actually pointing up above positive which means that we're exposing too much at the moment
so what we're going to do - I've still got it set to f1.8 which is
far too wide for this bright outside sunny day, so I'm going to shut that down. So as I turn
that you can see the light meter dropping and it's now on f8. So we're now shooting at 200 ASA
125th of a second at f8 which is a pretty good sunny day exposure I suppose. You can see
you can see the eight is lined up straight across the top there. So we now need to focus our image
so turning that focus dial - it's gonna be pretty hard to see with this setup but
you want to make sure.. let's imagine that that fence post over there is our subject
and you want to make sure that's nice and sharp if it was a person you'd want to make sure their
eyes are nice and sharp. So we're focused, we've set the light meter in the middle,
we've checked that the film's wound on, we can now take a picture. So we just press the shutter button
you can see the screen blanked out a second as the mirror flipped up
and now we need to wind on
and we're ready for our next shot
just here you can see this little number, that's how many pictures we've taken so
it says four, I've only taken one but like as I say I lost a few when I was winding it on
we know because we remember when we put the film in that this is a 36 shot film
so that will give you some idea of how many shots you have left. It's never 100% accurate
so you may find that you get a few more than 36 or it might be a couple less. It's usually slightly
more but basically just keep going until you can't wind that anymore and then you've got to the
end of your film. But always remember whenever you even adjust to a slightly different position
you will need to check that light meter again because the light
is constantly changing especially when you're outside and if you change angles
so yes you need to check it every single time, you need to focus every single time as well
The camera also has a self-timer which is I think clockwork, and you push it down to
the side and then it comes up and then takes the picture. I can't actually demonstrate that because
that's broken on this camera. It's also got I think you can attach a hot shoe to that thing there
and it also has an input for a remote flash there. Now you might notice that the shutter button
has like a little screw thread in the middle of it, that's for attaching a cable release which
is basically a remote control - it's a mechanical remote control. A lot of people actually still call
them cable releases today, and that's why - because it's just a physical cable which screws in there
so let's take one more picture. Let's take a picture of that tricycle.. it's not really going
to be shot but let's take a picture towards that tricycle. I'm just putting my special high tech
viewfinder cam on there. There we go we've got this lovely scene with tricycle handlebars, a rock wall
and a metal chicken. And as you can see the light meter has dropped down slightly so what I'm going
to do is move from f8 to f5.6. It's back in the middle again.. let's focus.. that looks pretty good
there we go. All right now I'm just going to go and take another
ah.. 30 or so photos to get to the end of the film and then I'll show you what to do.
Okay so my remaining shots indicator is now showing ah 35 there, and it's starting to get
a little bit tough to pull it across. And that's just about it. I'm just going to take a few pictures
randomly of the sky.. there we go that's it. So now the film's been completely used up
what we want to do is rewind it onto the roll so it's completely inside the canister so that we
don't expose the film. Now the first thing we have to do, I'm just going to turn the light meter off
around the front here there's this rewind switch we have to turn that to the 'R' position for rewind
and then this thing turns into a magical little handle, and if you think about the orientation of
the film it goes this way so we need to wind it It'll start off fairly tough because I'm pulling
the entire length of the film. It should slowly get easier as you get towards the end. And you
want to really make sure that you've wound the whole thing in before you take it out
and you'll feel when it gets to the end it'll suddenly get much easier to turn
there we go there's a little clicking sound as it flicked across, and it's now really easy to
turn. I'm quite confident that's in so I'm going to open up the back of the camera
there we go
oops.. hard to do when I'm not really looking at it. Here we go. So as I was saying before that's now
fully inside the canister and that is ready to be taken off to a lab to be processed
and just remember every time you load a new film make sure you set that ASA because otherwise
all your exposures will be wrong
so there you have it that is a 50 year old Olympus OM-1 film SLR