I kept reading about the Olympus XA – it looked like a simple rangefinder in its first model that gave the user some control via the aperture lever. I liked that first design since some of the later ones removed the rangefinder and aperture control. The overall setup reminds me of the Ricoh GR1 – a compact, fixed lens point-and-shoot with aperture setting. When I decided I wanted to get one, I missed out on some listings on APUG and RFF; then I found one for sale with a flash at the now defunct Camera Co-Op. I brought it to Professional Camera Repair to replace the foam, and then loaded it with a roll of Fomapan 100. It took a few weeks to finish shooting the roll, because I was trying out some other cameras at the same time, including a Nikon F3HP. Below are the results of the roll, after clean up and edits in Lightroom. Some frames are shown twice, where I’ve opened up the shadows to show the detail in the film. The only fiddly thing for me was the shutter release – I get the feeling that I need to use it more to where I’m not second-guessing the release pressure.
Contrasty rendering from the XA. 1/250 at f/2.8.
The same image with the shadows opened up.
