[originally posted Jan 10, 2007]
Olympus XA rangefinder: the reputation of this one might put it out of reach. People love them. High quality lens in a true rangefinder means good sharp images are in your pocket. More of a collectible/nice to have item than anything else but if they can be had on eBay for $20, it’s worth looking.
<update> just scored one for $5. Now to see how I get on with it.
Yashica TLR: I think I used one of these in middle school but didn’t know what it was or how it was interesting. SLRs were becoming accessible and I was jealous of some other kids who were assigned some SLR or other (thinking back, it may have been a K-1000 or something: not to knock it, but the quality of image from the TLR would have been quite a step up.) Alas, we are too soon old and too late smart. I am looking at one of these to try doing some portraits. I like medium format a lot but Holgas are not really reliable enough for what I want. And a Hasselblad is out of the question đŸ˜‰
And it looks like if I want to do anything with my large format negs, a large format enlarger needs to be procured. There are a lot of them about but most seem to be for local pickup: not much good if they’re several states away. So looking for paying work am I, once again, something that can fit into my chaotic life of kid-chauffeuring, field-trip chaperoning, and general monkeywork.
None of these knocks a good DSLR off my list, of course, but we’ll have to see how we can work it all out.