There seems to be an unwritten rule that if I spend my birthday in London, the Olympus XA3 comes with me.
I’m not sure when this became a tradition, but here we are again: another birthday and the same little black camera in my pocket.
There are far more capable cameras sitting at home. Apparently I don’t want them.
The XA3 just works here.
For me, the city has become something of a photographic playground. It’s busy, untidy and unpredictable, and the XA3 seems happiest when I treat it the same way.
Over the weekend I shot eight rolls of black-and-white film: Tri-X, FP4, Kentmere 400, Delta 3200 and even a roll of Tri-X Pan that expired in 1985.
My approach was loosely wabi-sabi. I wasn’t particularly interested in correcting every imperfection. Blur could stay blurred. Grain could stay grainy. People could overlap or wander into the frame.
Sometimes the imperfections are what make the photograph.
I started around Notting Hill and Portobello Road. It was the first roll of the weekend and, looking through it afterwards, I could see myself gradually finding my rhythm.
That’s one of the things I like about the XA3. After a while I stop thinking about the camera. Sometimes I use the viewfinder, sometimes I shoot from the hip and accept that a considerable number of photographs will contain elbows.
I found myself photographing ordinary things too. Signs, windows, market stalls and objects that caught my eye.
These bags were simply about repetition, light and shadow. Tourist souvenirs packaged up and ready to take home.
As the weekend went on, I became progressively looser.
The 35mm lens gives enough room for the surrounding chaos to become part of the photograph rather than trying to isolate everything into neat little compositions.
I like that unpredictability.
People appear and disappear before you’ve really had time to think. Sometimes you anticipate them; sometimes you get lucky.
And sometimes the scene requires almost no help whatsoever.
A Marilyn Monroe performer beside an advertisement featuring Marilyn while everyone else carries on with whatever they’re doing.
There’s not much more I need to say about that.
This FP4 frame came from what I think was a music-video shoot.
The woman blurred across the foreground was filming the dancers. Ironically, while she was recording their movement, she became the movement in my photograph.
An accident, but one I’m very happy with.
Forty-One-Year-Old Tri-X
Among the film in my bag was a roll of Kodak Tri-X Pan that expired in 1985.
Forty-one years old. Almost exactly the same age as me.
Unlike me, however, it had apparently benefited from several decades in a refrigerator.
I rated it at ISO 200 and put it through the XA3.
The negatives were foggier and softer than fresh Tri-X, but they worked.
This strange little self-portrait is grainy, murky and imperfect, which somehow seems appropriate. I’m standing there holding a camera from roughly the same era, recorded on film manufactured when I was barely a year old.
Neither of us has aged perfectly.
The same roll produced I Miss You In London.
I noticed the words amongst the different languages and reflections and photographed them.
There’s no elaborate story behind it.
I saw it. I liked it. I took the photograph.
That’s enough.
Later that evening, this alley in Soho caught my attention.
The illuminated graffiti against the darkness was enough. It’s exactly the sort of ordinary scene I find myself increasingly interested in photographing – something you could walk past without giving it another thought.
The XA3 is perfect for that. See something, take the camera from your pocket, shoot and carry on.
Thirty Minutes, Thirty-Six Frames
By the end of the weekend I still had one roll of Delta 3200 left and about thirty minutes before I needed to head for my train.
Taking it home seemed a waste.
So I decided to shoot the whole thing.
Thirty-six exposures in thirty minutes.
No hanging around deciding whether something deserved a frame. Walk, look, shoot, keep moving.
It was speed photography, and I loved it.
Ironically, one of my favourite photographs from the entire weekend came from those thirty minutes – and it wasn’t completely spontaneous.
I spotted the graffiti wall first and liked the composition. I’d been walking ahead of the woman on the left, so I stopped and waited for her to enter the frame.
She looked up at exactly the right moment.
The second woman appearing from around the corner was complete chance.
That’s probably the balance I’m looking for: enough thought to recognise a photograph, but enough freedom to let something unexpected happen inside it.
The thirty-minute roll also removed something I’ve realised can hold me back with film: the cost of every frame sitting somewhere in the back of my mind.
For half an hour I didn’t care.
I just photographed.
After developing the film and scanning everything on my Epson, there were obviously plenty of failures.
Good.
The weekend wasn’t about producing thirty-six perfect photographs per roll. The blur, grain, crooked frames, chance encounters and occasional complete miss are part of the process.
That’s the wabi-sabi element I keep coming back to. Not making photographs deliberately bad, but accepting that imperfection can have its own character.
And perhaps that’s why the XA3 keeps coming with me.
It’s small, simple and just imperfect enough that I don’t feel the need to be perfect either.
Next birthday, I suspect it’ll be in my pocket again.
And knowing me, there’ll be far too much film beside it.