My lovely little Trippy
If like me you are a child of the late seventies or early eighties you may remember the famous David Bailey commercials advertising the Olympus Trip 35. These were hilarious ads which normally featured a pretentious photographer mocking David for using such a small camera and not recognising him for the internationally famous snapper he was (there’s a link below if you want to see one of the ads).
A few years ago I was strolling around a boot fair in Surrey when I came across a little Trippy (the one in the picture) and snapped it up for the hefty price of £1.50. At the time I was just looking for cheap retro cameras I could stick on the shelves of my new flat, so it was just added to my collection of cheap photographic tat.
Before getting back into film photography I was mainly shooting Polaroid, however I started to wonder if any of the cameras on my shelves were actually capable of taking any photos. Of course pretty much all of them were either beyond repair, in film formats long since dead, or in desperate need of a thorough CLA before they would be anywhere near useable, but the little Trippy seemed at first glance to be OK.
The next day I went to boots and bought a role of XP2 (because I knew I wanted to shoot black & white but couldn’t develop yet) and went around the local area snapping at everything I could see. When I picked up my prints a few days later I was amazed at how good the pictures were. I had missed some of the focus points (zone focusing still catches me out sometimes even now) but they were clear and it would seem the light meter was registering correctly.
Some time after that I decided to go to Rome for a few days just to take photos of the great city. As well as a DSLR and an Instax wide, I also took my Olympus Trip as my one and only film shooter. All the black and white pictures in my ‘Rome’ Gallery are shot on this camera and (my dodgy focusing aside) it didn’t miss a beat once.
Without going to much into the technical details, the aperture for the camera is controlled (when not using a s flash) by a battery-less solenoid light meter. You can see it on the front of the lens as the knobbly, doughnut shaped glass that surrounds the element. With a lot of cameras using this type of light meter these days failing, the fact that this 40 year old camera can still take great photos using the automatic setting is testament to how well it was built.
In the about section of this website, I describe myself as an OK photographer who sometimes gets away with it. Two of the photos taken with this camera are amongst the ones I’m most proud of. If you look in the Rome gallery, you will see a couple of pictures with crowd scenes, one with a lady with a white shirt standing on a chair, the other taken behind some men themselves taking pictures of the Pope.
I’m not in anyway a religious person (in fact almost the complete opposite) but while in Rome I decided to go to the Vatican just to take some photos, not realising that Wednesday was the day of the ‘Papal Audience’ where tens of thousands of the faithful gather to see and hear the Pope in person. This meant some of the things I wanted to see, such as the Basilica, were out of bounds. However getting out of St Peter’s square once in was a lot harder than expected, due to the thousands of people coming in and the high security. So I decided to stay and see what photos I could get out of the situation.
I took quite a few pictures at the Vatican, but the two mentioned above are really special to me. I feel in these images you can really see that something special was going on, that something all encompassing was grabbing these peoples attention 100%, and for that one moment, this was the most important thing in the world to them. And my little pocket sized Trippy caught that moment.
I would recommend the Olympus Trip 35 to anybody thinking of starting Film photography
If you would like to see one of the David Bailey Adverts Click here
For my ‘Rome’ Gallery click here