Richard,
Having climbed routes on both El Cap and Half Dome, your Yosemite
picture in clouds with
caligraphy, definitely shows El Capitan, not Half Dome as shown in your title.
OM Content : My favourite climbing combo OM2S and 24mm/F2 worked great on Half
Dome (NW route),
but a great disapointment was I had OM camera battery problems just before the
start on El Cap
(Salathe Wall, to LH center of Richards pic). I was forced to borrow an old
Cannon p/s with
somewhat mediocre results, having a not WA enough lens, poor focus control,
occasional camera
shake when holding single handed while belaying etc.. Somebody else's Oly p/s
which I used a bit
on the route seemed better.
OM is relatively heavy compared with a p/s (XA say), but holding an OM single
handed and pressing
it against your head seems to give much less shake while simul belaying and
photographing.
Many years ago I used to use a 35SP for climbing, but the 42mm lens was not
really wide enough and
I lost it while hitchhiking :{ . I currently use a 2S/24mm for best results,
with an XA for when
I don't want to be burdened too much. I had a very compact Nikon p/s with a
very sharp 28mm lens
which worked quite well in place of the XA, until it packed up after being in a
humid environemnt,
(rain in the valley). The XA usually goes on river trips in a tupperware and
seems to survive
damp/high humidity conditions without problems. Sometimes after a long break it
seems the XA hair
trigger electric shutter release takes a lot of pressing the first time around,
but otherwise it
seems to take the abuse. I had a Rollei 35 at one stage but it was a bit too
fiddly, with match
needle metering, for climbing, and it got into trouble in damp conditions
despite being so basic a
camera. If I am day climbing I sometimes even use the 16mm or 21mm/3.5 wides.
It is a pity so
many of the small digital p/s, do not go very wide, so not so useful for
climbing. A climbing
friend had Leicas when I was a teenager and I always wanted one, but they were
so expensive and in
retrospect too heavy and the W/A's ridiculously expensive to be knocked around.
On trips to Peru I always used OM2(S) or OM1's (sponsored by Oly) which worked
well at high
Altitude and in snow, especially if you kept them inside your jacket when not
in use! A high end
Canon SLR somebody else used, packed up in one Peru trip, they were battery
hogs, so did not work
well in cold too. I once used a Konica Autoreflex T on a climbing trip to
climb Fitzroy in
Patagonia, but it was a bit flakey, was huge and weighed a ton. A friend on
the trip used a
Pentax Spotmatic (almost same size as OM1) and took along a very compact 17mm
semi-fisheye
takumar, with a few great results, which persauded me to try the 16mm and 21mm
Oly's years later.
Tim Hughes
--- Richard <richard-lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
..../
> my calligraphy + photo images here:
> http://richardmanphotography.blogspot.com/)
>
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