parkerpyne_investigates
Security guard at Herald Square
So it appears that I am back in the digital realm with the most recent acquisition of a Ricoh GR! For the longest time I've been trying to get my hands on its film ancestor, the GR1, but failed miserably. Nobody seems to want to part with one.
Anyway, the digital GR is a rather curious little camera. It's well made and quite a joy to hold in one's hand. Some of the reviews make it sound as if its build and feel rivals that of a Leica but that is certainly not true. On the upside however, it's infinitely smaller and lighter.
One immediate problem to solve is that of the viewfinder: It doesn't have one and offers no facility for an electronic viewfinder either. This initially put me off and my first days with the camera confirmed that I can't deal with using the LCD display on the back. If it could swivel, maybe there'd be a way but it's rigid so then I quickly surveyed the optical finders available.
So I dropped by at B&H this morning to see what was available. Disappointingly, my sales person told me that they might only have the ridiculous $600 Zeiss finder on display while I was interested in the Voigtländer 28mm OVF. Turns out he was wrong and I had a chance to try it on the Ricoh.
In a word, it's fantastic. In real life, it's much tinier than the photos would suggest and when looking through it, I was almost blinded by its brightness. I didn't even bothering checking its accuracy in store. This I did upon leaving the store. There's good news too: for objects three to four meters away, it's a perfect match to what the sensor sees.
With this OVF, the Ricoh suddenly becomes an incredibly nimble camera. One will first have to configure it accordingly which turns out to be a bit of a struggle: the GR's geek factor is really something else. It took me a couple of days to even realize that its adjustment lever on the back was also a button, opening up quite a few hitherto unknown possibilities.
The first set of settings I've assigned to the program dial's MY1 position is as follows: aperture priority mode, minimum shutter speed of 1/60 secs, maximum auto ISO of 3200 and snap focus, normally set to 2m which, at an aperture of f/7.1 or f/8 basically gives me a depth of field from 1.2m to infinity (the Ricoh will visualize the available depth of field using a green bar in its display - very nice). The focusing mode as well as the snap-focus distance can easily be changed without diving into menus should I ever have to.
The back display remains off entirely as there is no longer any need for focusing. With the brilliant viewfinder, virtually zero shutter lag and an inaudible shutter, this promises to be the perfect camera for the streets.
When reviewing the photos later in PS, I was a bit surprised to see that they didn't really seem all that sharp. There was a certain fuzziness about them which I initially attributed to the effective scale focusing that I am now using. My worries were unfounded however: The images crispen up very nicely when sharpening. The very low noise-levels of the sensor allow turning down the threshold all the way which brings out even the tiniest of details.
So far I am very happy with this Ricoh. It's not perfect tho. I for example played around with its manual focus implementation and found it to be utterly unusable. It will also take me a little longer to feel at home with its interface and it's rather impressively sized menu. But in the end it's all about customizing it such that the few parameters one actually needs to change all sit on a separate control.
As for that photo, there is little to see here. This was cropped to 4:3 after the fact. Most of the photos from this morning could do with this slightly more squarish crop which is odd because i've never felt that need when using a 35mm film camera.
Security guard at Herald Square
So it appears that I am back in the digital realm with the most recent acquisition of a Ricoh GR! For the longest time I've been trying to get my hands on its film ancestor, the GR1, but failed miserably. Nobody seems to want to part with one.
Anyway, the digital GR is a rather curious little camera. It's well made and quite a joy to hold in one's hand. Some of the reviews make it sound as if its build and feel rivals that of a Leica but that is certainly not true. On the upside however, it's infinitely smaller and lighter.
One immediate problem to solve is that of the viewfinder: It doesn't have one and offers no facility for an electronic viewfinder either. This initially put me off and my first days with the camera confirmed that I can't deal with using the LCD display on the back. If it could swivel, maybe there'd be a way but it's rigid so then I quickly surveyed the optical finders available.
So I dropped by at B&H this morning to see what was available. Disappointingly, my sales person told me that they might only have the ridiculous $600 Zeiss finder on display while I was interested in the Voigtländer 28mm OVF. Turns out he was wrong and I had a chance to try it on the Ricoh.
In a word, it's fantastic. In real life, it's much tinier than the photos would suggest and when looking through it, I was almost blinded by its brightness. I didn't even bothering checking its accuracy in store. This I did upon leaving the store. There's good news too: for objects three to four meters away, it's a perfect match to what the sensor sees.
With this OVF, the Ricoh suddenly becomes an incredibly nimble camera. One will first have to configure it accordingly which turns out to be a bit of a struggle: the GR's geek factor is really something else. It took me a couple of days to even realize that its adjustment lever on the back was also a button, opening up quite a few hitherto unknown possibilities.
The first set of settings I've assigned to the program dial's MY1 position is as follows: aperture priority mode, minimum shutter speed of 1/60 secs, maximum auto ISO of 3200 and snap focus, normally set to 2m which, at an aperture of f/7.1 or f/8 basically gives me a depth of field from 1.2m to infinity (the Ricoh will visualize the available depth of field using a green bar in its display - very nice). The focusing mode as well as the snap-focus distance can easily be changed without diving into menus should I ever have to.
The back display remains off entirely as there is no longer any need for focusing. With the brilliant viewfinder, virtually zero shutter lag and an inaudible shutter, this promises to be the perfect camera for the streets.
When reviewing the photos later in PS, I was a bit surprised to see that they didn't really seem all that sharp. There was a certain fuzziness about them which I initially attributed to the effective scale focusing that I am now using. My worries were unfounded however: The images crispen up very nicely when sharpening. The very low noise-levels of the sensor allow turning down the threshold all the way which brings out even the tiniest of details.
So far I am very happy with this Ricoh. It's not perfect tho. I for example played around with its manual focus implementation and found it to be utterly unusable. It will also take me a little longer to feel at home with its interface and it's rather impressively sized menu. But in the end it's all about customizing it such that the few parameters one actually needs to change all sit on a separate control.
As for that photo, there is little to see here. This was cropped to 4:3 after the fact. Most of the photos from this morning could do with this slightly more squarish crop which is odd because i've never felt that need when using a 35mm film camera.