Once upon a time, in fall of 2011, I was killing a Saturday morning making my usual Bozeman junk store runs. I started, as always, at my favorite such place — Pawn Depot and Nu2U on 7th. (When writing this, I found out that they had closed. RIP Pawn Depot.) I ended up rummaging through a box of those crappy plastic-lensed fixed focus 35mm cameras – Jazz Jellies, cheap Vivitars, etc. The kind of stuff that Lomography folks really get into these days. Anyway, mixed in this box of $5 cameras, there was a $5 Olympus XA.
The XA was not on my radar, but I could tell that it stood out. A few minutes of playing with it in the store, and I could tell that it was a high quality machine. I also quickly saw that it was a rangefinder, and I had always wanted a rangefinder — most of my 35mmfilm cameras up to that point had been either point and shoots (like the SureShot Classic 120) or manual SLRs. Even better, it was TINY. It’s actually hard to understand how small these are unless you hold one yourself. It’s really not much larger, and only a little bit thicker than a typical pocket-sized digital point-and-shoot of the early-mid 2010s. And into that size, it packs a super sharp 35mm f2.8 lens, and a fantastic control layout that lets you easily select aperture and focus quickly. It is an aperture priority only camera, it has no full manual, shutter priority, or full auto mode. However, the needle in the viewfinder will indicate the shutter speed based on the selected aperture, so you can easily adjust the aperture to match your desired shutter speed. I giddily paid my $5 and loaded it up with some film I had lying around. I had a roll of cheap CVS film (made by who the heck knows). I always shoot crappy film for the first roll on all of my cameras, in case they’re broken.
This camera quickly became my go-to camera. It’s just the perfect camera to carry around town, you know just in case you see something interesting
I took that camera everywhere. Like I said in the beginning, I don’t still have that camera. Why did I get rid of it if I liked it so much? Well, I wish I knew what happened to my XA. My working theory is that I accidentally left it on the FrontRunner when we were living in Highland, UT and I was working in Salt Lake City. But really, it’s anybody’s guess. My hope is that somebody found it and is still using it today. If that someone is you, let me know and I’ll get you my address to send the film that was in it.
