The joy of the Olympus XA
I know I like to rave about the Olympus XA, but I have my reasons. One of them is a lack of fear.
I was coming back home from dropping off some equipment in Pasadena (as seen in Urban Cowboy), and I passed a very picturesque overgrown pasture cut off by a nice barbed wire fence. The nearly freezing rain had caused a large puddle to form, and with the haze of the rain, it was oddly beautiful.
Since I was driving the insecure Jeep, and since the weather was extremely unpleasant, I certainly didn't have a nice camera with me. However, I did have the XA in my jacket pocket, sans flash. I'm sure I was quite a spectacle while I crouched near a small river of runoff water, trying to keep my balance without falling in, wiping off my camera lens after each shot.
You see, not only is the XA pocketable, it's cheap enough to not worry about it. Several are on ebay for under $50, so I feel free to take it with me wherever I go, even if the camera gets rained on, dropped from my pocket, or left in the sun. If I were limited to a Leica, or even just a Bessa R, I'd still feel anxious about using it in the middle of a cold rainstorm. And since it's so compact, I don't even have to think about carrying it. It's just there, in my pocket. After I dropped off the equipment, Liz and I dropped by the Houston Art Car Klub meeting and then to Brasil for coffee. I was very tempted to take a few pictures of Liz there, but the flash on the XA is just bulky enough that I don't carry it with me. The XA could have taken the photos just fine, but the shutter would have been open for at least a full second, if not longer.
I took quite a few pictures today by the pasture, and I look forward to seeing the results. I picked up last week's efforts, and not a single frame is worth showing. Not a one. I picked up some more C41 black and white (not called 400CN, called something else), as I'm not doing home development and I'm always in a hurry.
Posted by ward at January 13, 2003 03:21 AM