Skip to main content

Dusk Etc.


I recently picked up an Olympus XA again, after a hiatus of two years or so. And during a week of using it and seing the first roll of my Olympus 35 RC developed, I realized that I feel priviliged to use the two best compact rangefinder cameras, hands down.

These first pictures were the first taken with new XA.





They were all taken in Gothenburg on a grey October day.

The camera has a 35 mm wide lens which I am very accustomed to use, since I had my old XA always with me for almost ten years. The wide angle invites the surrounding context into the picture narrative. A 50 mm lens would cover a more narrow field, allowing a more concentrated picture.



The Olympus RC that I've only begun to use has been a wonderful aquaintance. I like the focusing very much - it having a very short throw much like the XA. The best pictures from the first roll were also taken in very cloudy weather - even dusk.







The Olympus 35 RC camera has a 42 mm lens, which for me doesn't at all seem wide. It is a focal length that I've become very accustomed to, using it on my digital camera all the time.

The Minolta Hi-matic C camera sports a 40 mm lens, which is entirely within my comfort zone. Below are some recently developed pictures.



I like the Hi-matic C a lot. It looks cool with its minimalistic design and the green button above the lens, which is what you press when you want to collapse or pop the lens out.


Below are a couple of medium format pictures made with my Zenobia, which is a foldable bellows camera from the 1950s. It can only make 4,5x6 cm images on 120 film but as a photographer you are in full control of your exposures - except for focus accuracy. The film is Ilford HP4. By the way, all pictures taken with 35 mm film cameras is exposed on Fomapan 400 ASA.




Thanks for reading! Please don't hesitate to comment below. And visit my shop getOurBooks at Etsy.

By the way, you should support the new Reflex analogue camera through their Kickstarter campaign.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Chaika Leica

Well, here's a Chaika 2M that I bought from Alex Helios via Instagram.  It's a great full manual viewfinder half-frame camera. The wheel on the top is for shutter time selection, from B to 1/30th to 1/250th of a second. The square button on the front right of the camera is the release/exposure. The lens mounted on the camera in the picture is not the original Industar-69. The Chaika is a rare model compact camera since the prime lens is detachable. What is more is that it has M39 screw mount. But - like with the Paxette M39 system - you can't get focus with a lens from another M39 system. Unless you adapt the lens or - in this case - the camera (mount)! The Chaika mount is easily detached from the body by loosening four screws. If I want to mount the Leica thread mount M39 (LTM) lenses on the Chaika - which is my goal with this mod - I have to add 1.3mm to the mount. That is what is needed to change the camera's flange focal distance (FFD) from Chaika system to L

A busy photographer

This photographer is now an owner of a house with all that entails. That is my focus since October and will be for some time.

Lomo-Modd-Orama

A Lomo Smena 8 camera with a faulty shutter. An Olympus Pen F camera. Part of a microscope adapter for the Pen. That's what I started out with. 45 minutes later I had a new lens! Mount The mount came off a microscope adapter. I got the adapter from my first (of two) attempts to buy an Olympus Pen F. There seem to be some unscrupolous ebay sellers around peddling useless Pens with microscope adapted prisms. Luckily - in hindsight - I got a microscope adapter with this first Pen. Which I now trashed when a Lomo Smena 8 without a future landed on my doorstep (figuratively speaking). Conversion / Havoc Smena I only knew the camera as a half-frame camera [Correction - it's a full frame camera!] called Smena 8 and hadn't thought to place it in Lomography-land until I read the name Lomo on the lens when it was already modded. Unwittingly I had tread the tiles of lomo-dom twice in as many weeks, also having put two rolls through a Praktica CX-1 which appears to be Gr