Wallace Koopmans Artlog

Back in the early 1980’s the Olympus XA was quickly adopted by many photographers as a pocket camera for many reasons.  It was small and pocketable but it also produced good results.  This of course is due to the lens which is made using 6 elements in 5 groups.  (That’s where the F Zuiko comes […]

The Olympus XA reached a certain cult status among film cameras and perhaps its not for just one reason but several.  If you start with the idea of what do you want from a camera and that turns out to be ‘packability’ then the XA meets that.  The clamshell design both protects the lens and […]

I loaded an Olympus XA with Lomochrome Purple film and set the ASA to 200.  The film is rated at 400 ISO but over exposing is supposed to render darker purples.  Shooting it during a mostly dreary winter time may have not been the best idea, perhaps spring when everything here is green would be […]

The Olympus XA is a fantastic little rangefinder if your willing to live within its limits.  Those limits are primarily the tiny focus lever and its aperture priority with minimal over rides.  At it’s heart is the 35mm f2.8 six element lens that produces sharp images from corner to corner despite how close the design […]

One of the smallest rangefinders you can find, the Olympus XA is a great little carry anywhere camera. The only drawback is the tiny little focus control and it’s semi hidden nature makes focusing somewhat fussy. You can set the aperture and focus in such a way that it works as zone focusing. At f5.6 […]

The XA2 (shown on the right) is a wonderful little camera that looks much like the XA. There are key differences though, beginning with the lenses. The XA has a 35mm F. Zuiko lens that has 6 elements and a maximum aperture of 2.8 while the XA2 has the D. Zuiko with 4 elements and […]

Small is beautiful as far as I’m concerned when it comes to cameras.  Here are some frames from my Olympus XA which is the smallest true rangefinder that I own.  I wish that I could design my own camera free of any concerns about money or infinging on copyright or purhaps the laws of physics.  […]

Some shots from outside the hotel I had meetings at all last week.

Where do you see rectangles,  everywhere?  If you can imagine the world in front of you as a flat two dimensional plane it can be an interesting exercise to look for ways to divide it.  It can be helpful to look through the viewfinder to generate that flat view and frame a scene but with […]

I find I really like the 35mm focal length that the Olympus XA2 has as well as many other small cameras from the late 70’s early 1980’s.  It’s noticeably wide yet gives a convincingly natural field of view.  With the Xa2’s three zones of focus you might think that it would be difficult to achieve […]

When I first saw this forgotten water bottle I wasn’t to sure what to make of it but as I approached it became clear that this would produce an interesting subject against the ground of the artificial turf.  The clarity achieved by this little camera never ceases to amaze me.  The full size print I […]

If it were not for the difficulty in coordinating meeting up with others for Craigslist sales I would no longer have this camera.  You see I also have what is considered the more desirable XA which is a rangefinder rather than zone focusing and has a F2.8 lens instead of the XA2’s slower f3.5  and […]

Now long expired I loaded a roll of Ektachrome 100VS in my Olympus XA. The XA is known for its decent exposure system so shooting slides isn’t an issue but I didn’t know how the film would behave or even how it had been stored over the years. I turned out that the slides were […]

If I haven’t said it before I will say it now, the Olympus Stylus Epic is the best small 35mm camera that is readily available.  They can be found in all kinds of different places because Olympus sold them by the millions.  It’s the perfect carry anywhere camera because of its size and that you can […]

There are certain cameras that have reached a cult status which can cause a bit of a problem writing about them because what is there that hasn’t already been said somewhere. My take though on the Rollei 35 SE and really all the variants of the Rollei 35 is that they are a great lens […]