1600-speed (and such) film season is marching toward us. I've been having a great time with my Olympus XA2 since the middle of last year, especially when I went to Nanjing. It's everything I need in a pocketable camera (half-frames like the various Olympus Pens are lovely too, but geez it takes an age to finish a roll!), but I had this nagging itch about ISO 800 not quite being enough. What to do?

You go and find an XA3 going cheap, of course. Mine cost me all of $40 (before postage, sadly). It adds ISO 1600, and DX (auto film detection - I could do without it, really). Fuji Neopan 1600's coming out a winner in it, so much so that it may well be the only type of film I'll use in this camera. I can always use the XA2 for, y'know, colour film - I'm expecting grand things from a single roll I have of Fuji Provia 400X, in fact.

There's more to see from my Olympus XA3 over on flickr.

I'm still alive, just trying to work out what to say.

Mostly I've been taking lots of photos, lately. I even made a book of black and white photos from Nanjing (I'll do another one of some of the colour shots soon).

I hope you're well.

I started a new group on flickr in case anybody else has photos of Housing Commission Flats around Melbourne or, indeed, other parts of the world.

Feel free to join in. Please.

The aforementioned exhibition - UNSENSORED09 - opens tomorrow night. Please come along!

(yes, this means I can't go and see The Bats at the NSC.)

I'm in an exhibition next month. Please come along!

I noticed in Polyester today that The Bats' new album The Guilty Office is getting a local release in the next couple of weeks - I'd already ordered one from smokecds.com a month or two back, since I hadn't seen any sight of it here (it came out last year in NZ). Oh well. It's a lovely album, so listen out for it. There's a free track up on last.fm - The Orchard - and they're playing at the Northcote Social Club on August 7th.

Via The Online Photographer comes this teaser for something vaguely related to the "half-frame" Olympus Pen series that I hold rather dear to my heart - I currently have three, an EE-2, a D2 and an old EE somebody gave me recently (I'm still trying to finish a roll in this last one to find out if it works). The presumption is that this new model is related to the proof-of-concept Micro 4/3 camera that appeared at trade shows last year - as Matt points out, though, the thrill of being able to get an M-mount adapter for Micro 4/3 cameras in order to use our Leica or Voigtländer lenses is tempered somewhat(!) by the realization that the focal length gets multiplied by 2, so a lovely ultra-wide 15mm lens ends up as a rather pedestrian 30mm equivalent.

In any case, we'll find out tomorrow!

I had an idea or two to generate (and encourage further generation of) some content for the Melbourne Silver Mine blog, which had been a little too quiet so far for a group that's doing great things in Melbourne. We're starting off by interviewing various members of the group - our first is with Jacqueline van Zetten - and we have an article by Barbara Fischer coming up next.

I joined the Ektar craze and bought myself a pack of five rolls in 120 format to try out in the beloved Kiev 60. I went for a wander with Ross, who got a particularly nice shot. Mine weren't quite as impressive but even so, here's two I was happy with:

International Commie Camera Day 2009 seems to have been extended into the weekend, though I didn't manage to capitalize on the extra time - I did manage to shoot a whole roll on the main day (Friday), though.

[ see all my photos from ICCD 2009. ]