The GetDPI Photography Forum
Great to see you here. Join our insightful photographic forum today and start tapping into a huge wealth of photographic knowledge. Completing our simple registration process will allow you to gain access to exclusive content, add your own topics and posts, share your work and connect with other members through your own private inbox! And don’t forget to say hi!
FUN with Ricoh GR!!!
- Thread starter roanjoh
- Start date
Yes...we caught each others eyes, the Young soldier and me, perhaps both in the feeling of being somewhat lost, but I guess that might be the inner life of all receptions, the main attraction, the Pictures, seems to get lost, while all people seems not to care about them, turning their backside towards, and just looking at the others, who also are looking for who might be looking at themselves... (apart from the Young girl who was sneeking herself to look at the naked tatoos....)
thorkil
rayyan
Well-known member
Thorkil, excellent images, all.
thorkil
This one..well seen and shot.:thumbs:
Best regards.
John, the GR seems to be a strong camera in a very attractive package, its simple, extremely unobtrusively, almost feeling primitive, yet sufficient (and actually very) complicated to please almost any wished setting.
And it lies just so good in your right hand, you don’t need anymore than your right hand, and you can point it almost up in peoples face (but there comes the inner conflict with ones inner shyness, but the reward feels huge when you are able to overcome this inner shyness).
But back to the point, yes it has changed my possibilities with a camera, while I have always been dreaming of doing things, for example just like this:
I was walking very quickly, and just without slowing down, just took the GR up from the belt, turning it on, just one shot, no setting, no control, no looking down at the camera, just looking at the subject, and then passing quickly by. And afterwards the picture were almost 90% of what I could dream of, the moving lines, the energy, the moving half-dream-mood (not just old-pig-thoughts about skinny legs). That’s just a feeling of, as if life is intruding upon you or in you, and you are intruding in life. Perhaps it’s about undefined associations, a strange thing when the visual thing, like soft guitar-playing are playing around with your undefined mental-strings in the back of your head. Apart from our very structurated parts of our mind, that we use most of our time, there is a lot of anarchistic things going on inside there, too. And when visual impressions spontaneously are playing games with these parts of our brain, strange things are happening.
And getting a camera that sometimes can fulfil (or even capture) that part of our unspoken dream is very seldom.
And I think the GR (and before the IV), for me, perhaps is the closest thing.
When I was about 19½ I drove around alone in an old VW-bus in east-Europe for a couple of month, and ended up in Amsterdam. Here I sat at the Rijks-museum, for a whole week, where one could get delivered, in the reading-room, at your table, and carefully look at, all the original drawings and etchings from Rembrandt.
His paintings are of course fantastic, with that special, special light. But, it’s in the drawings of the old masters where life get through. Very loose sketches, very artistic hints, where shapes, moods, dimensions just are hasty and casually, even though surprising precise, maintained and preserved in the mind and on the paper, often just with the use of very simple and Spartan lines.
(One drawing, I just have to tell, where the lost son is coming home to his father and he is dismounting his horse in front of the stone-stairway, and the father pathetic is reaching his arms towards the son, Rembrandt, in the right corner, nearest to the audience, had placed a dog sitting, hard pressing and shitting... I guess that was his way to survive the tiresome complying of different orders).
But what I meant to say, is, that it’s not always the disclosure of the actual life that gives me satisfaction, but often more, when you once in a while succeed in catching the warm wind that suddenly occurs in a fraction of a second in your mind or towards your skin, and you visualize that feather-lightness that occurred in your anarchistic part of your brain, at that moment, and you reach out and grab it, and your capture transform that strange thing in a sort of communication…
and perhaps the GR is the nearest thing, the nearest tool, the most friendly little camera (and often succeed in taking these uncontrolled chances), to come close to being able to do so…
thorkil
Last edited:
Maggie O
Active member
J
JohnW
Guest
Thanks for your thoughtful and poetic response, thorkil. Very nicely stated. Shooting with the GR has made me realize how left-brained my work has been. So much of creativity is breaking free of structured and patterned perception, and this little camera contributes to that mentality in ways no other camera has for me. This applies to both front-end capture and back-end processing.
Of course, the risk is sloppiness. But that's OK with me, as I push my personal envelope a little. In her book, "Bird by Bird," Annie Lamott writes that the key to good writing is "shitty first drafts." In other words, we've got to be loose and spontaneous enough to create, without our inner censor stiffling us. So your reference to the freedom of drawing is right on.
Sean Reid's explanation of the GRD line as sketchbook cameras was one of my main motivations for buying in. Maybe I'm giving the GR too much credit. Maybe it's more of an internal change for me. But the camera has certainly been a catalyst to my own creativity. Sketching is not something I've done before with a camera, but I'm really enjoying that mindset.
John
Of course, the risk is sloppiness. But that's OK with me, as I push my personal envelope a little. In her book, "Bird by Bird," Annie Lamott writes that the key to good writing is "shitty first drafts." In other words, we've got to be loose and spontaneous enough to create, without our inner censor stiffling us. So your reference to the freedom of drawing is right on.
Sean Reid's explanation of the GRD line as sketchbook cameras was one of my main motivations for buying in. Maybe I'm giving the GR too much credit. Maybe it's more of an internal change for me. But the camera has certainly been a catalyst to my own creativity. Sketching is not something I've done before with a camera, but I'm really enjoying that mindset.
John
Last edited:
J
JohnW
Guest
Maggie O
Active member
Maggie O
Active member
silasslack
New member
800 ISO @ f2.8
Maggie O
Active member
Maggie O
Active member
J
JohnW
Guest
Hey, Louis, congratulations. It is a wonderful camera. Look forward to more photos.
John
John
