Carlsbad Flower Fields

It’s springtime and that means, well it means a few things and one of those things is cleaning. I’ve been digging around in my office which resides on the bottom floor of our warehouse, underneath the stairs that go up. Theres a fair amount of storage under there and what did I dig out? SURPRISE more cameras and film. Amongst those cameras was the intrepid Olympus XA2! I knew I had one of these somewhere. Unlike the XA, I never even started to use this camera so there was no film in it. I don’t think I had ever shot it before and I was excited to try it out. Catrena and our friend Cristina had made plans to get dressed up in fun springtime outfits and hit up the flower fields in Carlsbad, CA, what better way to spend the day trying out a new camera? Colorful! Vibrant! Nature! EXCELLENT!

I’ve always read that people prefer these cameras, the XA2 has a very good reputation. I’m sold on the XA already, it’s such a great camera, how could it’s sibling with a slower lens and zone focus outperform it?

I love the first photo on a roll of film

The results

Well I love the results. The colors are vibrant, it has a nice vignette to it, especially in daylight and I nailed the focus on every single picture. That last point was my biggest concern! Zone focus cameras can be tricky but it almost feels like maybe it doesn’t even matter because every single picture was SHARP. It was easier and faster to shoot then the XA and the results are just as nice, maybe even nicer! It would be fun to add the same film to both cameras and go shoot them both at the same time. I haven’t tried the flash attachment yet but I imagine it’s going to work pretty well. There are two photos I took at dinner that I missed focus on, but considering it was extremely low light there is no camera shake happening which I thought was impressive.

I’m going to throw some black and white in and play with that but as of right now, I’m very impressed with it and will continue to use it!