Another new old camera I’ve been trying recently is an Olympus Pen EE-3 half-frame camera made sometime in the 1970’s. This camera uses  regular 35mm film, but as the name implies, only uses half of each frame, doubling the number of images per roll. The really interesting thing about this (and other) half frame cameras is that when you hold the camera up to your eye, the default orientation of the image is portrait (height larger than width), rather than the landscape orientation we are so used to. It takes a conscious decision to turn the camera to shoot landscape.

We have all seen images in landscape that would have been so much better in portrait orientation, and I find with this camera I am forced to think about whether landscape mode is the best way to go. This is a cheap little camera and I may not use it much, but as a different brush, it gets me thinking about how to frame and compose using my other cameras.