Category: Photos
This Walk is Always a Blur
My friend Irwin was married this past weekend, at St. Bartholomew’s Church in New York City. More shots are at Flickr. I wish him and Catherine the best of luck – it’s a crime that we haven’t seen each other very often, despite living in the same city. Only Toffy made it from the ISM circle, and it was good to catch up with him and see where he’s landed. Columbus, OH is a long way from Manila.
This was the second weekend in a row that I attended a wedding, and I’m tuckered out.
Hip Shot
Test shot from my new Ricoh GX100. I picked one up largely on the basis of the high-iso B+W output I’ve been seeing on the web, and the noise does look better than most of the compacts out there - almost like film grain. Obviously in color I’ve been sticking to ISO 80-200.
The ’snap mode’ setting for focus works quite well - DOF is huge on these small-sensor cameras, so I’ve programmed one of the two user settings to be B+W, iso 400, and snap mode - call it my street photography default. Ongoing output can be seen on my Flickr photostream.
Point and Shooo…wait
For the last few years I’ve been primarily been using a combination of a Lomo LC-A and a couple of M-mount rangefinders (a Bessa R2A and a Leica M4) for taking photos. But the cost of good film processing is rather prohibitive (a decent lab here in NYC will generally charge around $20 per 36-shot roll for 4×6 proofs and a CD) so I’ve been looking to shoot more digital for everyday walkaround stuff. I get this urge every three months or so, and always return to shooting with the Lomo and rangefinders. The primary reason isn’t some romantic attachment to film, it’s that they’re fast to operate.
I have an aging, battered Canon A85 that I use every now and then, but it frustrates me - setting stuff using multiple button presses is time-consuming. I realize that I could get a small DSLR (say, a Pentax K100D with a pancake lens) but I’m thinking of something more pocketable. I would’ve thought that three years later the digicam market would’ve gotten better by leaps and bounds, but sadly that doesn’t seem to be the case. Here’s the few contenders:
The Ricoh GR-D: 28mm is a bit wide for my taste, but the results I’ve seen (especially B+W) have been far more interesting than the usual digicam snaps. The GR-D2 is rumored to be around the corner, though, otherwise this would be in my hands already. Some have criticized the lack of an optical viewfinder (you can mount one to the hotshoe, though) and the noise at higher ISOs, but its vocal defenders contend that the noise approximates film grain quite well in B+W.
Ricoh Caplio GX-100: 24mm to 72mm zoom (I don’t like zooms usually but this one has a step-focus feature to jump to the classic focal lengths - 24/28/35/50/72), anti-shake. Otherwise the control scheme is very similar to the GR-D. If I had to choose a camera specifically to replace the A85, I’d probably get this one since the zoom and anti-shake make it more flexible for when Jordan’s using it.
Finally, there’s the vaporware Sigma DP-1, which has intrigued me ever since it was announced - a big sensor in a digicam. Sony did this first with their R1, but that body was SLR-sized. Besides the sensor, however, it appears they were paying close attention to the GR-D - fixed 28mm, hotshoe. f/4 is a bit slow, but if the results at high-ISO settings are ok, then losing a stop probably won’t matter too much. If it ever comes out, that is.
Of course, if someone wants to give me one of these I won’t complain.
