Olympus 35 RC Rangefinder

This cute little camera is a classic Olympus “Rangefinder”.

 
 This means, unlike a Single Lens Reflex (SLR) camera, the viewfinder is not coupled to the main lens of the camera. The film will see the light through the main lens in the middle of the camera, whereas the viewfinder is on the top right corner of the camera. You are not seeing exactly what you will take a picture of. There might be alignment errors for close by objects, for example. Well, what is the point of having such a camera when SLRs don’t have such problems? Size, mainly. Since rangefinders do not have the mirror moving up and down with each shot, the bodies are much less deep. Also, many of them, like the Olympus 35RC come with a fixed focal length lens (no zoom) which is physically quite small. Therefore they are quite convenient, and will fit in a coat pocket.
 

Shooting the Olympus 35RC is simpler than I thought it would be. To shoot in automatic exposure mode, there are mainly two controls: The focus ring and the shutter dial.
The focus ring allows you to choose the point of focus. There is a small, yellow tinted rectangle visible in the viewfinder which puts two images over one another. The movement of the focus ring adjusts this interaction. If the picture in the yellow rectangle looks ok, you are in focus on that object. If it looks misaligned then it is not in focus. In practice, I just guess the distance to my subject and set the distance using the focus ring.

 To adjust the exposure, set the shutter dial to some value and the aperture ring to A (automatic). Then, looking through the viewfinder, press the shutter halfway down. The needle at the bottom should swing to some value. If it stops at one of the aperture values, you can take the shot. If it goes all the way to the left into the red zone, the light level is not enough and the camera will not shoot. You can set the shutter slower (smaller number) to have more light and try again. You can see the viewfinder with the shutter speed indicated at the top and the needle pointing to the automatically selected aperture at the bottom.
 
It also has full manual controls if you would like to shoot it that way.
 
I bought this camera on ebay for 26€. It is in good working condition although I have had to procure a special battery for it. I’m shooting at the moment with 400 iso black and white film.
 
The only thing I do not like so far is the low light ability. The camera has no onboard flash of course, and the film speed dial only goes to iso 800. Even though the lens is f2.8 and thus reasonably fast, the slowest shutter speed available is 1/15. This does not allow much in the way of low light fotography. It doesn’t really make sense to have such a small camera with a flash just as big so what I would really like to have is a iso 1600 or even a 3200 setting in there. Ideally I would like to have the exposure meter adjusted up 2 stops so that it reads iso 400 correctly at the 100 setting and 3200 correctly at the 800 setting. Then I would be able to shoot in all sorts of conditions.
 
To sum up, this is an interesting old camera, and quite refreshing after shooting with modern digital compact cameras.

Read about the Minolta Hi-Matic G Rangefinder.