Using the Olympus XA4 For A Sketchbook

Like most people out there I have a day job. It would of course be wonderful to make photographs full time and pay my bills with print sales, but alas, I’m a cubicle warrior by day and a photography dabbler on the weekends. As such I try my best to dip my toes into a creative headspace whenever I possibly can.

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Photographed with an Olympus XA4 and Fomapan 100 35mm film.

Every so often when I manage to wake up and get ready for my day a little early I like to take a walk around town and make street photographs with my little pocket Olympus XA4. I’ve never claimed to be a great street photographer, but sometimes I find the practice cathartic, like doodling in a sketchbook. It’s just a great way to look at things, practice making compositions in the viewfinder, and to appreciate the place you live.

Not every photograph I make needs to be a masterpiece. Heck, NONE of the photographs I make need to be a masterpiece. I’m still going to do it anyway regardless of the outcome

Photographed with an Olympus XA4 and Fomapan 100 35mm film.

I find the Olympus XA4 to be a perfect camera for taking snapshots on the street. It’s sleek and durable and fits easily in a winter coat pocket or the side pocket in my daily backpack. Ultimately it’s a point and shoot camera so creative control is limited, but the trade off is worth it for the portability. I also appreciate the fact that it is capable of longer exposure which is helpful when I’m walking about before dawn.

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Old Houses in the Deserts of Los Angeles

Several years ago I made a pilgrimage down to Southern California. I’ve always had a love and hate relationship with the larger metro area that people typically just lump into the label of the greater Los Angeles. On the one hand the traffic is monstrous and frustrating in the best of times. The sprawl and the row after row after row of generic apartment buildings and flat six lane roadways just make me sad.

At the same time, despite the massive population in the area, it is shockingly easy to find places where one can be isolated and alone. It is simply a fact that Los Angeles, and by extension, Southern California, is a place of contradictions.

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Photographed with a Mamiya C330 TLR and Fomapan 100 medium format film.

I only brought one camera with me on this trip, my Mamiya C330 TLR. I also only brought one type of film with me, Fomapan 100. Predictably, the sun was incredibly bright and harsh the entire trip and I found myself working with the film at ISO 50 nearly the entire time. I’ve always found Fomapan to be a great film to pull down to a lower ISO. Diluting Rodinal just a little bit and developing with some slow agitation tends to yield very low contrast negatives, something I needed to counteract the harsh lighting.

Only an hour or so outside of the greater Los Angeles area there were a lot of abandoned houses, totally falling apart and sitting forgotten under the unforgiving sun. No trees around, no people, not even paved roads leading up to the front doors. It was eerie and quite and made for a great spot to expose this particular frame that has long been my favorite from the trip.

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Minolta Hi-Matic AF2 On The Streets of PDX

I’m incredibly lucky in my life in that I have the ability to walk to work every single day. I rather like this, not just because it saves me money on gas and is great exercise, but it also provides me with the opportunity to make some photographs while I’m traveling to and from the office. It’s nice getting a little creative before starting my day pushing paperwork and it does a lot for my mental well being.

One of the cameras I tend to carry with me often is the Minolta Hi-Matic AF2. I bought it at a thrift store over a decade ago not really expecting to use it much. Sometimes you just never know what is going to become important to you later in life.

The Minolta Hi-Matic AF2 is a bit of an odd bird when it comes to cameras. It’s a 35mm point and shoot camera that more or less does everything for you. Auto-focus. Auto-exposure. Auto-Flast. etc. etc. Strangely however it has a manual film advance lever and you set the film ISO manually on the lens. The camera also talks to you. Sort of. It makes a long continuous beep when you need to activate the flash and it makes short little beeps at you when you are trying to focus too close. If you can’t remember which beep is which, there is a handy cheat sheet printed on the back of the camera body.

Minolta was a weird camera company at times with some rather unconventional design ideas. The Hi-Matic AF2 is a good example of this.

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The lens is a fixed 38mm at f/2.8. It’s decently sharp. Not the sharpest lens I’ve ever seen. Certainly not the worst.

So why do I like using this camera for street photography? Well, there are a couple of reasons:

First, the camera is actually fairly large for a point and shoot 35mm camera. Most people these days are clamoring for tiny 35mm point and shoot cameras that one can fit in their shirt pocket. There is nothing wrong with this, but I often find tiny cameras like this annoying to use. Tiny viewfinders combined with tiny buttons can make for a frustrating experience at times.

The Minolta Hi-Matic AF2 isn’t going to fit in your pocket. But it is light weight and is easy to throw into a backpack. Which is something I have with me anyway when I’m on my way to work along with a laptop, my day planner, and a host of other daily tools. The viewfinder is big and easy to look through and thanks to the manual wind lever, the camera is mercifully free of any loud film advance motors when you are trying to not be noticed.

Perhaps more importantly, and easily my favorite aspect of the Minolta Hi-Matic AF2 is the fact that the lens is threaded for a filter. Even better, the sensor for the auto exposure sits behind the filter thread. That means it is easy to mount color filters to the camera and you don’t have to worry about compensating for exposure. I love this feature. When I’m working with black and white film I will often put a yellow filter over the lens just to increase contrast a little and make my negative punchier. This is usually not possible with point and shoot cameras but for whatever reason Minolta made this a feature on the Hi-Matic AF2. Thanks Minolta!!

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Photographed with a Minolta Hi-Matic AF2 and Fomapan 100 35mm film.

I bought my Minolta Hi-Matic AF2 at a thrift store for a whopping $6.00. Looking around on-line at sites like eBay and Facebook Marketplace I notice they tend to be going for about $30 or less. I’d call that a fair price if you plan on actually using the camera. A lot of point and shoot 35mm cameras seem to be commanding higher prices these days and I’m happy to see that the Hi-Matic has been spared that particular fate. This is not a miracle camera after all. It isn’t going to make you a better photographer. It doesn’t have the sharpest lens on the planet. It’s metering is adequate and gets the job done but isn’t always perfect.

I’m personally ok with all of that. In fact, I find the camera enduring because it is perfectly average, which isn’t always a bad thing.

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Oregon Badlands

This image goes back a long long long way. Over a decade ago perhaps? I’m not really sure. I am at that age where everything seems like it was “ten years ago” when really it was probably a lot longer than that.

The image was made on a day trip out to the Oregon Badlands which are just outside of Bend more toward the center of the state. Oregon is a funny place in that on the west side of the Cascade Mountains it is green and damp and rains a lot but on the east side of the Cascade Mountains it feels more like a desert, or at the very least like the grand plains that one sees in an old western film. The trees become brittle and dry, the ground dusty, and the light harsh and intense.

It can be quite a change for a photographer who is used to overcast skies and more or less perpetual doom and gloom.

Still, change can be a very good thing and it is always fun to exercise the creative brain with new location and new situations. Due to the fact that the light was very bright and the sun more or less straight overhead, I exposed my roll of Fomapan 100 back to ISO 50 in an attempt not to blow out the highlights. I succeeded with this particular image, but not for most of the roll.

I still consider one image out of a roll of twelve to be a victory though.

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Nude With Mamiya C330 TLR and Fomapan 100

While the United States waits on pins and needles for the results of an election I’ve decided to find my happy place by organizing old negatives. Don’t get me wrong, I’m as anxious as anyone to see how the election of 2020 turns out, but I also know keeping my eye on the news is just going to drive me mad. Sometimes… heck… maybe even most of the time, it is best to just turn off the internet and ignore the phone for a little while.

It’s perfectly ok to just lose yourself in your own little world. Especially when that world is full of photographs and rolls of film and memories.

Looking at this image makes me realize I miss working with my Mamiya C330 TLR a little bit. I still maintain that the Mamiya is one of the best cameras ever designed and I should give mine a little bit more love.

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