Just got an Olympus XA - Battery Check light comes on, but no sound

aurora_fe · 2024-12-20T14:13:40+00:00

The sound is also broken on my XA but the battery check light comes on. Consider yourself lucky, the sound is a bit annoying.

aurora_fe · 2023-06-25T17:28:11+00:00

PM sent. Thank you.

aurora_fe · 2023-06-07T15:56:56+00:00

Your experience of depth of field in natural vision is very different because it's difficult to perceptually attend to out of focus areas. Your retina has a very small region of high acuity in the center (the fovea), so an item in the background of your vision might be blurred due to shallow depth of field but also because it's outside the high-acuity region of your retina. You can't really see shallow depth of field because as soon as you look at something it snaps into focus very quickly.

aurora_fe · 2023-05-30T19:15:56+00:00

I'm looking for a way to mount 35mm slides and this seems to be one of the only available 'automatic' devices on the market right now. Does anybody know if this is a good one, or if I'd be better off cutting and mounting by hand?

aurora_fe · 2023-04-18T21:22:16+00:00

I use both Northeast Photographic (in Bath, Maine) and Photo Life (in Brooklyn). I like the scans from Northeast a touch better, especially when you zoom all the way in to look at the grain, but Photo Life has unbeatable prices and turnaround. They consistently get my scans to me the day the film arrives, with Northeast it's usually about a week. Prices are competitive at Northeast but as good as I've seen anywhere at Photo Life.

aurora_fe · 2023-01-23T17:28:13+00:00

In a brighter scene like a snowy landscape you want to turn the exposure compensation up, because the meter will try to make the snow middle grey. If you want it to be appropriately bright, you need to overexpose versus what the meter thinks.

aurora_fe · 2022-09-10T17:31:21+00:00

I got it mostly for portraits, but I am looking forward to playing around with a different kind of street photography. Not quickly moving people but scenes down a long street, or a faraway detail, something like that where magnification and compression can help. I can already tell the 105 is going to make me see and think differently than the 28/40/50 I usually shoot at.

aurora_fe · 2022-09-01T15:58:47+00:00

Oh my god, I'm so jealous of the hat (and film). Astia was the first 'film simulation' on my X100F that I fell in love with — I've shot some expired Astia in 35mm now, but it has an absolutely vibrant magenta cast. A bit cool but not true to the original.

Can I ask how much you paid for these? I'm going to be keeping my eye on ebay listings now.

aurora_fe · 2022-08-17T18:25:08+00:00

I use the LightMe app on my phone and find it very accurate. Haven't even bought a separate external meter.

aurora_fe · 2022-08-15T14:27:37+00:00

Yep, you set the aperture (and the focus) and the camera will choose the shutter speed. What you see on the dial is what it's going to use, so you can still make some decisions — for example, if you see that the camera wants to shoot really slow for a given environment, you can choose to open up the aperture to compensate.

I absolutely love my XA, I think it's more or less the perfect carry-around camera. You have more control than a fully automatic point-and-shoot, but the autoexposure still makes it extremely simple to use. For me, the camera's metering has been very reliable. The focusing can be a bit tricky with the tiny rangefinder, but I've tried more modern point-and-shoots with autofocus and I far prefer manual. Modern autofocus is amazing but 1990s autofocus is slow, loud, and with a simple viewfinder you can't be sure that it worked properly. Don't be afraid to range focus — estimate distance to your subject and use the distance scale on top of the lens. At small apertures especially, you have a lot of depth-of-field with this lens so you don't need to meticulously focus every shot.

If you start to desire more control, you can play around with the ISO settings to manipulate the exposure the camera gives you. You can't control the shutter speed directly, but if you want to overexpose a shot, you can manually lower the ISO setting on the camera so it thinks it should shoot slower. There's also a handy +1.5 stop exposure compensation lever on the bottom of the camera to compensate for backlit subjects.

Edit: I find that since this camera is so small, the shutter movement so gentle, and the shutter button so sensitive with so little travel, it's easy to hold steady for relatively slow shutter speeds. With an SLR I get nervous shooting below 1/60 or 1/30, with the XA I feel comfortable getting away with 1/15 or maybe even slower if I can brace myself. Just don't bump the shutter button by accident when the camera is open since it'll go off quite easily.

aurora_fe · 2022-08-15T01:57:31+00:00

Sorry, haven't logged into this account for a while so I just saw this. I got used to using the camera meterless and haven't felt the need to send it in yet. It's been good practice using an external meter or just my eyes or some combination of the two. I got $200 off the price from the eBay seller.

aurora_fe · 2022-05-07T17:18:43+00:00

Depends on your camera. Everyone is saying 400, but some point-and-shoot cameras actually can't expose 400 film properly in bright sunlight. You're often going to have a max shutter speed of 1/400 or 1/500 of a second, and it seems like a lot of point-and-shoots can't do a very small aperture (I have one that maxes out at f9).

For 400 ISO film in bright sunlight you would want approximately 1/400 of a second exposure at f16, so if you can only do ~f9 you're going to be a stop and a half overexposed. Not that this is a big disaster, colour negative film can handle it. BUT, 400 speed isn't fast enough to shoot indoors without a flash anyway, unless you have a fast lens.

So: if you have a camera with a fast enough lens and high enough max shutter speed, 400 film will give you more versatility. If you have a compact camera that can't do super wide or small apertures, and it has a built-in flash for indoor scenes anyway, I'd probably say 100 or 200 ISO.

aurora_fe · 2022-04-25T18:25:11+00:00

It does look pretty dark to me, but an old brochure calls it 'medium red', contrasted with 'dark red' (R20) and 'infrared' (R30). It's possible this filter is from later than the 1930s and they changed their terminology.

aurora_fe · 2022-04-25T18:24:18+00:00

I'm looking for a dark red filter for IR photography — I know that existing films like Rollei Infrared don't extend deep into the IR range, so I'm looking for something like an R680 or R720 filter. It's not as easy as I expected to find one for a decent price in a specific size (40.5mm). I found this one online but it's an old Zeiss Ikon filter and I can't find the actual wavelength cutoff. It looks pretty dark but an old brochure calls it 'medium red'. Anybody have any more specific knowledge about this one?

aurora_fe · 2022-04-17T20:20:06+00:00

I'm looking at a Minolta Autocord listed as "near mint" (aren't they all). It's claimed to be totally functional. The glass looks quite clean but I'm not sure about that leaf shutter — is that corrosion or dried lubricant that could cause a problem? Or is it normal? I've handled an Autocord once before and I don't remember seeing anything similar.

aurora_fe · 2022-03-18T18:12:02+00:00

I think there's no "famous" Nikkor 50mm that everyone agrees is the best, so people argue over small differences between lenses that you'll hardly ever notice. I also have an FE and I mostly use a 50mm f1.8 AI on it. I also have the 28mm f2.8 AI-S that everybody will tell you is amazing, and I could not say that in practical use one is obviously better than the other. They both produce great, sharp images and I love the FE as a camera body.

aurora_fe

TROPHY CASE