Picked up a used Ricoh GXR with an APS C module. Been waiting it seems three years for the camera price to drop into my purchase zone. I've been shooting it around the house for a couple of days but needed to take it on the road.
It takes a picture which rivals the X1, which I think was a great walk around camera. None of today's shot was post processed like the earlier X1 shots I'm featuring. I think these could be pumped up nicely, probably as good as the X1.
It has Ricoh's usual excellent user interface with settings and menus and quick menus for nearly everything. The "direct" button quick menu is excellent. The screen is beautiful. The camera is industrial strength build (semi-pro). It's relatively small and would be seen as really small except I have some GRD's and those cameras are small. The GXR has to accommodate a larger sensor module and needs to be bigger. It has a great grip (right handed, of course) and it is a photographer's camera, no doubt.
What I did wrong today (reflected in the shots, below). Began shooting bracketed exposure for HDR at home and left it that way. Switched over to RAW shooting to test the senor's best shots. When I got started in the student union, it took RAW + Jpg and three shots of each. Way too slow for walking around shots. So I got lazy and turned off the bracketing and RAW to speed it up. Should have just turned off bracketing but I also wanted to see the jpg output which is what I got. Over-saturated a bit. My bad.
I then shot indoors at f2.5 and walked outside and the fastest the shutter will go is 1/3200 and in bright sunlight it ain't fast enough and I got my initial shots over exposed shooting in Aperture priority and f2.5. Later, I also chose evaluative metering rather than spot and in some high contrast scenes I got my subject's somewhat underexposed. Needed spot metering. The last bus operator shot, of my friend Carl, I realized it was too dark and re-shot by exposing the darker area of the bus and re-framing him. The 2nd shot exposes for him and not the overall scene not by spot metering but by evaluating a dark area. I needed to blow out the window to get him exposed properly. I'm definitely still learning to use the camera. I has it's own peculiarities, including what I'm taking to be a tendency to underexpose. I am spoiled by the Fuji cameras with dials for shutter speeds and real lens aperture adjustments as well as exposure compensation dials. Real photographer tools to allow quick adjustments. The Ricoh has the means to make the changes but you have to view the screen and make the changes in secondary manner. It works but as I found out today, it ain't nearly as good as having the real controls on the camera.
I felt like the shots were better than the EOS M I shot a week or so ago. The EOS shots look great, like a consumer camera. The Ricoh shots raise the bar. Sharper. More detailed. The EOS can be sharpened, of course but the Ricoh, like the Leica, like the Sigma DP and like some of the Fuji's have out of camera goodness that's hard to describe. I apologize for some of the shots but it was a test. Here they are (camera shot 1st):
It takes a picture which rivals the X1, which I think was a great walk around camera. None of today's shot was post processed like the earlier X1 shots I'm featuring. I think these could be pumped up nicely, probably as good as the X1.
It has Ricoh's usual excellent user interface with settings and menus and quick menus for nearly everything. The "direct" button quick menu is excellent. The screen is beautiful. The camera is industrial strength build (semi-pro). It's relatively small and would be seen as really small except I have some GRD's and those cameras are small. The GXR has to accommodate a larger sensor module and needs to be bigger. It has a great grip (right handed, of course) and it is a photographer's camera, no doubt.
What I did wrong today (reflected in the shots, below). Began shooting bracketed exposure for HDR at home and left it that way. Switched over to RAW shooting to test the senor's best shots. When I got started in the student union, it took RAW + Jpg and three shots of each. Way too slow for walking around shots. So I got lazy and turned off the bracketing and RAW to speed it up. Should have just turned off bracketing but I also wanted to see the jpg output which is what I got. Over-saturated a bit. My bad.
I then shot indoors at f2.5 and walked outside and the fastest the shutter will go is 1/3200 and in bright sunlight it ain't fast enough and I got my initial shots over exposed shooting in Aperture priority and f2.5. Later, I also chose evaluative metering rather than spot and in some high contrast scenes I got my subject's somewhat underexposed. Needed spot metering. The last bus operator shot, of my friend Carl, I realized it was too dark and re-shot by exposing the darker area of the bus and re-framing him. The 2nd shot exposes for him and not the overall scene not by spot metering but by evaluating a dark area. I needed to blow out the window to get him exposed properly. I'm definitely still learning to use the camera. I has it's own peculiarities, including what I'm taking to be a tendency to underexpose. I am spoiled by the Fuji cameras with dials for shutter speeds and real lens aperture adjustments as well as exposure compensation dials. Real photographer tools to allow quick adjustments. The Ricoh has the means to make the changes but you have to view the screen and make the changes in secondary manner. It works but as I found out today, it ain't nearly as good as having the real controls on the camera.
I felt like the shots were better than the EOS M I shot a week or so ago. The EOS shots look great, like a consumer camera. The Ricoh shots raise the bar. Sharper. More detailed. The EOS can be sharpened, of course but the Ricoh, like the Leica, like the Sigma DP and like some of the Fuji's have out of camera goodness that's hard to describe. I apologize for some of the shots but it was a test. Here they are (camera shot 1st):
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| Now I've upped the aperture but still evaluating the whole scene for exposure which makes the subjects too dark. Should have spot metered the girls. |
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| Probably set it up to over expose 2/3s of a stop from now on. We'll see. |
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| Kris Johnson, photographer, shooting a Mamiya medium format camera |
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| If you're going to meter, use a meter, eh? Old school works too. |
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| Check the earlier EOS post for this shot a week ago. |
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| Hey, Ed. |
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| Carl, better exposure. |
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| Back yard shot from earlier in the week, 3 bracketed shots, merged in PS. |
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| Same side by side merger as EOS M shot from an earlier post. A bit darker. |
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