It’s been rumored that Fujifilm will soon release a new “half frame” digital camera with a vertical sensor.  That’s a pretty cool feature, daring to be different and promoting the artistic idea of diptychs. (placing two somewhat related/unrelated images together and having that interplay evoke more studying or pondering over a composition that would otherwise pass by even quicker in this doom scrolling era) 😉

While that Fuji camera would be cool to own, I’m sure it will be pretty expensive and hard to get as usual. (update: it’s called the Fuji X Half and is a paltry $825! 🙂

The other day I remembered that my old beat Olympus E-M1 has a dedicated mode on the dial (along with P, S, A, M, Movie, SCN, ART) that Oly calls PHOTO STORY. It creates these photo juxtapositions in-camera!

Basically it has pre installed layouts/masks and you can take pictures in real time and place them as if you are making a book.  It’s a pretty neat feature and I seriously never even considered using it until the other day.  Olympus always had these over the top ART presets since my E-PL1 days (one of their first m4/3 cameras circa 2010!)

How you access this mode is to turn the dial to this Mosaic/Tiled Gallery.  Those who use WordPress plugins to arrange their images (like me!) will be very familiar with the icon.

The above pictured might be the closest to what the new Fuji is possibly bringing to the world.  I don’t think there’s a way to split it 50/50, but there are plenty of layouts and options in the menu system.  Pretty cool for such an affordable camera that can be found very easily on the used market for a couple hundred dollars.  (I mainly bought this model for the live composite time lapse feature, and sadly, rarely use my Olympus cameras)

Here are some brief excerpts from the PDF manual from Olympus:

1) Rotate the mode dial to (Tile Icon).

A PHOTO STORY menu will be displayed.
• Standard
• Speed
• Zoom In/Out
• Layout
• Fun Frames
• Works in progress

2) Use “Up Arrow/Down Arrow” to choose the theme of the PHOTO STORY.

You can choose different effects, number of frames and aspect ratios for each theme.

You can also change the aspect ratio, the division pattern and the frame effect of
individual images.

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Here are some examples of the E-M1 Photo Story jpegs:

In keeping with the m4/3 theme, I shot the product photos of the E-M1 with it’s little brother the E-M5 (pictured above).  Alas, that smaller and more affordable camera lacks the Photo Story mode. It’s still a cool looking camera with a great sensor and image capabilities though.