Combining Two Loves

So I have just updated a short article on the Olympus Stylus 35mm film point and shoot camera.  If you have not seen it please have a look HERE. In the article I explain why it is one of my favorite cameras and shared some of the images I have taken with it. Since you cannot set the ISO manually (it reads it directly from the DX information on the cartridge) you have to trick it into shooting the ISO you want.

The first roll I simply used a non-DX coded cartridge which the camera then defaults to ISO 100.  It was FP4 which has a native ISO of 125, easy enough to alter the development time slightly.  The end result was fantastic!

The challenge is not how to marry this camera, with its DX Coding limitation in order to shoot my HP5+ (with a native ISO of 400) to shoot it at ISO 3200! After all, it would be a sad day in photography world if I could not shoot my favorite film through my favorite cameras!

Why would you shoot ISO 400 film at 3200? The wonderful thing about HP5+ is that it is a very tolerant film which lets you push and pull it much farther than others.  I first pushed it to ISO 800 and could not tell a change in grain appearance.  I then pushed it to ISO 1600 and everything was fine.  But then I took a leap of faith and pushed it to 3200 and I fell in love!  The contrast, pleasant grain and complete darks and lights make it an amazing film!  As an added bonus an ISO of 3200 lets me shoot in some very dark corners!

So I had two options to shoot HP5+ at ISO 3200, the first is to buy some ISO 3200 film, shoot it and then reload the cartridge with HP5+ film.  This was the path I was going to take until I ran across an article written for Japan Camera Hunter!  Here a guest writer explains how to alter the DX coding on HP5+ to shoot it at 3200!  So 45 seconds with an "Xacto" knife and I had the right DX coding.

So tomorrow I will walk out of my house with my point and shoot fully loaded with HP5+ and set to shoot at an ISO 3200!  

Below is a shot I took on HP5+ at ISO 3200.  You can see that the grain is still very pleasant, the darks are all there and even the white window sill has detail.  Nothing is blown out or hidden.  I like HP5+ at ISO 400, at ISO 200 it is fine as well.  But it really comes into its own at this very high ISO.