On The Road with Vicky Lamburn

Bodiam Castle, East Sussex

Taken shortly after sunrise on 21 Feb 2009
I really do love using the Leica M2

Leica M2, Kodak EBX 100, Hoya 81A and Voigtlander Ultron 35mm

Continuing from last night’s post, this is an early impression of the Olympus XA.

SLRs were in the early 90s about as fashionable as socks and sandals, only your granddad had one. Since then the SLR (and DSLR although I lump them altogether myself) has had something of a resurgence with many people who have shot point and shoots jumping on the SLR bandwagon with something like a Nikon D40 or Canon EOS 450D fitting their bill very well indeed.

The problem with SLRs only becomes apparent however when you venture into photography that needs to be a bit more discrete (street scene, gigs, museums, documentary, candid work) or where you may want something a bit lighter/smaller. Granted the D40 and EOS 450D/1000D is about as small as you could comfortably go with an SLR but they’re still a bit bulky particularly with a lens on.

I don’t own either of those SLRs but I have played with both and whilst I think they’re good cameras, I much prefer the bright and large viewfinder of my EOS 3, and for the most part its heft and size is a positive. However, it’s not discrete and when you’ve walked 120 miles with it (I recently walked the South Downs Way which is 100mi + 20mi to-from accommodation/food) you know all about its heft!

 

Enter the XA

When I returned from my recent trek, I was resigned to accepting that whilst I would never part with my EOS 3 and its undeniable construction quality was a very good thing, my neck was raw from carrying it. And it’s not the first time I’ve had that. I needed something smaller. I already have an Olympus Trip 35 but it’s a 40mm aspect which whilst seemingly not far off my favoured 35mm focal length, does make a difference. It’s also a bit of a guess when it comes to precise focussing.

The long-term goal is to purchase a Voigtlander Bessa R2a/R4a (made by Cosina but I’m not a label snob) with a nice 35mm f/1.4 lens but that may take a year or so to afford. So what to do?

Olympus have always made small neat and high performing cameras in many cases. There is the Trip 35 I’ve already mentioned, the Mju II (Epic) point and shoot, the OM range of SLRs, their four thirds DSLR system, not to mention their innovative half frame Pen cameras… And the XA.

The XA is not like a Bessa R or Leica which has a very distinct style, it’s a very modern looking camera (well, more modern looking than an M3!) that packs a 35mm f/2.8 F.Zuiko lens, a fully coupled rangefinder, a rugged clamshell design and sensitive shutter release to minimise camera shake.

Wide aperture and the rangefinder ‘way’ make for accurate focussing and
sharp images at slow shutter speeds in low light

Without recounting what you can find on the web: it’s an excellent rangefinder for the money and is AE ready with its built in meter, and is an aperture priority camera (Av) rather than say the Canonet QL17 GIII which is a shutter priority camera. The quality is sharp, it’s compact, quiet, easy to focus and well made. It won’t exactly run circles around a £3500 Leica system (e.g. an M7 + Summicron 35mm) but it’s far better than the price ravine would suggest. I paid £34 for a recently serviced XA with the A11 flash appendage.

In Use

Immediately I worked on focusing. A fully coupled rangefinder is so simple to focus. You have the viewfinder and in that is a bright rangefinder patch that is essentially a secondary overlay of a part of the image. All you have to do is move the focusing ring until the bright patch and underlying image are lined up with no apparent ghosting. Easy! This is a key way in which low light performance of a rangefinder can be much better than a SLR, in particular an AF SLR which can sometimes hunt around for its subject.

Having quickly mastered that (I am no manual focus stranger, with my much loved 35mm f/2 Super Takumar on my EOS 3) I loaded up some Ilford HP5 and set off to V Festival in Weston Park, Staffs.

The F.Zuiko 35mm lens takes very sharp pictures at f/8-11 much more
so than the XA’s dimensions may indicate!

Most people went with digital point and shoots. I would question seriously that apart from those buying disposable cameras, few people would have been using an esoteric 35mm film camera like me. (There again, I did see someone with an EOS 1d MkII or III with a cheapy Sigma 28-135mm lens on it…) Unlike most, I knew it was hopeless to photograph the stages so I focused on unsung things like the loo cleaners, bar staff, caterers, the decimation of the campsites etc. and it was a pure pleasure to use the XA. At mid-day I was shooting mostly at f/16 (1/500th second shutter speed — sunny f/16 rule on ISO 400 film) and focusing was easy enough though sometimes it was hard to see the markings and shutter speeds but mostly it worked great.

The camera is also dead quiet with its super sensitive shutter release which fires at the slightest of pressure. I’m used to sensitive shutter releases (a la EOS 3/1v/1D) so this is no problem to me but those with slightly spongier shutter releases (a la EOS 400D/30D etc.) or heavily mechanical shutter releases may take some time to adjust to this. What this should mean is that it should be possible to take a shot at 1/15th second shutter speed and not have much camera shake evident.

My friend reading. Sharp and accurate focussing even though the XA’s
rangefinder is not exactly of Leica, Voigtlander Bessa or Zeiss Ikon Standards!

The camera was also very light and compact. Ideal in a coat or pocket in my shorts. It also proved quite resilient to the English rain and drizzle so a big thumbs up there. This at least ticked the small and light boxes.

In terms of discreteness, the XA is probably as good as it gets. It looks to be little more than a basic point and shoot, so you can be sure to not get to much attention when you don’t want it. You could very easily sit waiting with it set to f/8-16 and at hyperfocal length waiting for the right decisive moment and fire without causing any disturbance.

To be continued….

I would have written this a week or more ago but with the recent illness and slowly recovering I have been slow to do anything, let along spend any time really on my blog. (Bar the Olympus Trip 35 which is by the way — proving to be a rather versatile little camera, quite odd though when one fires the shutter and here’s a ‘puny’ click when one is used to all the clack and whizz of a fancy 35mm SLR….)

So here goes, and you might just notice a trend in this…No Kodak. I’ve never needed to reach outside of the results Fujichrome provides, but maybe I should do someday…

• Fujichrome Astia 100F
  Not everyone’s cup of tea this, but on the odd occasion this is great for demure portraiture and slightly downbeat atmospheres. It’s a low saturation delicate slide film that when used right is incredibly powerful in a way that even Provia 100F doesn’t capture for me.
  ‘la vita e bella ma la mia ragazza ne piu’ – by esmus (Flickr)
  
• Fujichrome Provia 100F Low grain, excellent colour saturation and a very good general purpose slide film (in my terms.) Fine detail and very good for portraiture. Also good for landscapes when you don’t want the blown out ‘Disney’ effect that some people apply to Velvia 50/100. I’m not a big user of Provia 400F as I rarely shoot colour shots needing high speed film, that is usually down to Tri-X 400, Ilford XP2 or Delta 3200 at either 1600 or 3200.
• Fujichrome Velvia 50
  There was a time when god bless it, old Velvia RVP was RIP. Replaced by Velvia 100 and 100F. Velvia 100 is quite nice but just not quite the same and 100F is something I have not quite fallen for, as I will always reach for Provia 100F instead. However, Fuji was so inundated with demand for the old Velvia 50 that they managed to source new chemicals or something, but the main thing is its back and just as good as it always was.Velvia is a famous slide film, lush greens, rich blues, sock it to them reds and happy yellows. It does exagerate colour but in a way that I love, as its often said Velvia captures the scene how people remember a scene after a few days i.e. much more saturated than it really was.
  This slide film only works on bright sunny days. I have never been impressed by a Velvia slide shot in overcast/dull conditions. I tend to shoot this at ISO 50 close to sunrise and sunset, and ISO 50 during the rest of the day. If I use a polariser which isn’t really needed for Velvia IMHO, I even sometimes step sunset shots down to ISO 32 which can have a good effect and save shadows turning black and skies turning deep blue if not inky black themselves.

  Velvia is poor for portraiture as a rule of thumb but I’ve shot a few parades with it in Summer and the result whilst a little OTT, has been very fun. My main use for Velvia is landscapes on bright days throughout the year, and evening street shots when I want a bit of that summer zest and punch at 7pm in Brighton’s North Laine or that ilk!

  
  Red Sky at Night Panorama (2) by myself
  Canon EOS 3 + Velvia RVP 50 + 24mm Sigma Lens
• Velvia 50 to me is the polar opposite to my sheer love for black and white. I currently don’t find any difference between RVP and RVP 50, though my current fridge levels shows I only have 10 rolls of old RVP left (2 refrigerated, 8 frozen) and 1 roll of new RVP 50 (refrigerated) so… yikes. Need more

My current stock levels

They’re fairly healthy but lacking in two key areas:

1. 21 rolls of Reala Superia 100
2. 1 roll of Provia 100F (what?!)
3. 0 rolls of Astia 100F (not unusual…)
4. 0 rolls of Delta 100
5. 1 roll of XP2 (what?!)
6. 2 rolls of FP4
7. 3 rolls of Tri-X
8. 1 part used roll of Delta 3200
9. 1 roll of Velvia RVP 50
10. 10 rolls of Velvia RVP (old Velvia 50)

Bit concerned at the lack of XP2 and Provia 100F. But the level of Reala 100, Velvia 50 and Tri-X is good And for irony… a picture captured with a digital camera of this…

I’ll paste it here in a few days time, the Windows PC is refusing to acknowledge my phone is plugged in and right now I don’t have the patience to get it to see sense

If it’s not a migraine (before Christmas), a dodgy back (January) or just feeling sick as a dog (cough, sneezes, lethargy and dull headache – now) I’m typically ill before I go away and I can ill (no pun intended) afford time off work at the moment as I have so much to do. Hopefully an early night will cure much of my ills… Being single is great except for that bit where you get ill and when you need someone to just nip out and get some paracetamol or Lemsip!

Anyway aside from feeling dog rough (and looking a right dog too, blodshot eyes, grey pallour — for I am not an image of health and wellbeing…) I have acquired a new toy. Along with splashing out in some ways on the EOS 3 just after Christmas (not intentionally but shit happens) I have really come to love it. It’s one heck of a piece of kit. However it has one thing that it doesn’t do quite as well — discreet street photography.

The EOS 5 wasn’t a small camera either (not like the Rebels/three digit EOS series’) but it was I would say a quiet SLR. The EOS 3 has a noticeable (but not a terrible) mirror slap that immediately I aware of on the first frame I fired. This isn’t too much of a problem but with the size of the EOS 3 and the mirror slap, it’s not easy with a prime lens to snap a shot in the streets and carry on with people unaware the majority of the time. Sure if I had a 70-200 f/4L I would not have a problem, but I don’t — at least not yet. (Maybe by the end of the year.)

So the next best thing was a discreet good quality point and shoot which was cheap and unobtrusive with a good lens. Somehow and I cannot remember how I stumbled upon the Olympus Trip 35.

Photo Copyright mrlob (click on picture to open it in Flickr)

A solar powered camera that requires no battery, is constructed from metal, durable, accurate, automatic, small, rugged and of course can shoot a mean roll of Tri-X.  It has a 40mm f/2.8 Zuiko lens, and automatic aperture control and shutter speed between 1/40sec and 1/200sec depending on lighting conditions metered by the selenium meter. Not too bad for a camera launched in 1968. (My example was made in October 1970.)

It’s basically a good solid point and shoot with a bit of a rangefinder capability on it too.

Photo Copyright twentyhertz (click on picture to open it in Flickr)

Now I’m not for one minute thinking that this will take pictures reliably that are anywhere near as good as some of results from my SLRs (notably the EOS 5 and 3) but by all accounts it doesn’t appear to be useless either. Ken Rockwell’s site has some interesting information on the Trip 35 and how it stacked up to his EOS 5D and 17-40 f/4L lens… Should I mention at this stage the Trip cost me less than a tenner with postage?

I’m off to London on Sunday for a couple of days and I’ll have the EOS 3 and Trip 35 in tow but something tells me that the EOS 3 is going to be resigned to the night shots underneath Westway and that during the daytime the Trip will be champion… I’ve already loaded it up with one roll of Tri-X, which to me seems its natural film. That said, here’s a great photo taken with this little camera:

Zabriskie (Flickr)

Of course this is assuming I still don’t feel like a bag of shite come Sunday.

I’ve had a right busy week me. It started on Saturday which I will go onto, then Sunday I put together my new wardrobe. On Monday and Tuesday I roamed the seafront with my camera snapping with glee and painted two walls of four of my front room which is good progress. Last night admittedly I was creamed* and tonight I have just sat about watching telly and cleaning up. And now to update my blog.

If you’ve been living under a rock, or just generally not heard any news – you might be aware of a ship called the Ice Prince that sunk off the Dorset coast shedding a lot of its cargo of timber. Long and short of it is that a wood slick was heading east for the English coastline and it so happens that my dear town of Worthing with its five miles of coastline was hit the ‘hardest’ with timber stretching as far as the eye can see and further still.

I had a bit of a ‘heads up’ on this as I put the press release out on the worthing.gov.uk website on Friday (not that I’d be the only one to know of course even at that stage) so I duly headed off down to the seafront Saturday morning. Took a number of snaps before the wood really came in. You only have to do a search on Flickr for Worthing and order it by most recent to see that practically every photo for nearly a week has been of the ‘wood slick’ for photos tagged with Worthing.

As such I got this shot of the pier and a few planks (no not me) that were starting to come in early on Saturday before the beach was closed and well the scenes you can see from Flickr occurred:

Taken on the EOS 3 with XP2 at ISO 400 and the EF 50mm f/1.8 II. Worthing Pier is in the background. I also got rather wet taking this photo. My bottom for one (bending down to angle the tripod’s elevation) and feet the other (my trainers I was wearing have one or fifteen holes…)

A deserted house on the foreshore at West Worthing. This one took a while for me to get right by which time I had it framed and the gate just right (which I didn’t move… Just worked it as-is) an estate agent said to me “You need a hand there?” — I said no no, just taking photos. He thought I was interested in the property (which I was but not to buy) and explained the problem with squatters.

Again taken with the EF 50mm (great lens for the money – nothing basically.)

And finally a Holga-esque inspired homeage to a photo in January ’08’s Black & White Photography magazine:

Worthing Palms

This came out much better than expected. Again the EF 50mm at work. (Eschewed the wide angle the past couple of days.) The light was fading fast but this was a cracking sunset on the foreshore at Worthing and the palms so still in the winter sun with a striking shadow just caught me whilst everyone was fixated on the washed in wood. This was probably taken with a slow 1/10th sec shutter speed if I remember rightly and it was a dead difficult job to get enough DOF while keeping the camera steady (caught without my tripod as I was walking home from work) — in the end the slight blur has given it a fantastic quality. This has been blown up to 16 x 12 and I am pleased as punch with it. For the living room no less.

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So there you go. All shot with Ilford XP2 Super 400 C41 process B&W 135 film on Canon EOS 3 with EF 50mm f1.8 II lens. The XPS film does induce some grain but it gives a bit of quirky character I find in these. A very enjoyable and creative week photographically.

Check out my Flickr page for more shots and a growing catalogue!

Scanning support on Linux seems to be somewhat better than it was about four years ago where I remember getting very scared reading about something called SANE (which would eventually drive me inSANE…) and in the end it was one of the driving forces that sent me packing my bags back to Windows XP in 2004. After all with SP2; it was pretty neat on my then T23 which if anyone ever had affection for a laptop; I had it for that one. It was a beauty and travelled with me around the world… (..leans on chin dreaming whimsically of far off climbs…)

But it still seems that though things are better; they’re not fantastic. I really need to get hold of average scanner (USB naturally) that would also scan slides and 35mm film. (Yes I own an EOS 5… That’s EOS 5, not 5D…whatdya think I am, rich?) However it seems there are no compatible options; I was hoping the Canon Canoscan 4400F might have something going for it but it doesn’t.

So, in the end I have a few options:

• Install Windows on my desktop (dual boot or something, maybe VirtualBox?) and then purchase said scanner. Cheapest option but not ideal as it’s quite a bulky way to get around the incompatibility equation.
• Purchase a Linux compatible 35mm film/slide scanner such as a Nikon Coolpix dedicated scanner. Expensive although the SCSI ones are cheaper. Downside is that doesn’t scan normal documents.
• Purchase a Digital SLR and sell the EOS 5. Not as bad as it sounds because all my lenses are EF and would work on EOS digital. Downside is that my 24mm lens will have the 1.6 magnification factor (or whatever it is) as will my 28-135mm. Also technically say I got an old 300D body; it would still cost a few hard earned pennies but it could well be worth it. At least I get to keep my two lenses.

So what’s a girl to do? I am really enjoying my photography at the moment and have surprise myself at what I have got out of my crappy w810i’s built in camera. OK it’s not that crappy but it’s digital zoom only, and it’s only centre weighted metering; but it does have some basic exposure settings and when composed well, it gets good results in daylight.

The problem is that the EOS 300D is also a 6.2MP camera which I’m not sure is the resolution I would want. After all; that’s lower than film. I would prefer something like the EOS 350D or even a 400D. But I’m short of about £400 in that case.

For the time being I’ll just take it down to Jessops and get them to slap it onto a CD but these are things to think about. I like my EOS 5, even if it is a bit of tank especially when it’s sat next to something like a 300D; it looks like big daddy has arrived for tea