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Hello everybody, and thanks for a serious forum and all the interesting threads. I thought I could share the enthusiasm of my initial experiences with Ricoh GX100 for serious architectural documentary photography. With serious, I mean straight vertical perspective, zero barrel distortion and sharpness in details, speaking merely in technical terms. Since 1992, I’ve been using a 4x5” plate film Cambo Wide with a Schneider Super Angulon 1:5.6/65 mm. A fantastic tool, to put it mildly. But you can’t put it in your pocket.
For a more everyday use, I wanted to find a decent pocket camera with a similarly wide angle high quality lens, and there was no other alternative than the Ricoh GX100. It’s an impressive little camera, and works beautifully even for serious architectural photography, with a little help from some basic software. Small sensor noise is not an issue with this type of shooting, which is low ISO, anyway. And small sensor huge depth-of-field is pretty handy, indeed.
My example shows two images. The starting point is a very casual, underexposed, hand held shot on a dark and depressive day, with a seriously tilted perspective, in order to fit the whole building in the frame. This dng file was first processed in Lightroom with basic tonal adjustments. From Lightroom, a quick external (TIFF) edit in LensFix CI (for mac, =PTLens for PC), to get rid of the barrel distortion. This inexpensive software has specific presets for the GX100, and it does the job in a flash, automatically. After (and only after) LensFix, another external edit in Photoshop (perspective crop), and final adjustments in Lightroom (which is the unnecessary extra here).
With this test, I also used the wide angle converter. It’s a quality product, but it shows minor softness at the other(!) end of the frame. The 24mm equiv. wide end of the zoom is wide enough for most architectural work, but the 19mm option is a treat. The pocketable 24mm, by the way, makes the GX100 an easy choice over the GRDII with its 28mm (/21mm), or any other 28mm quality pocket camera, for that matter. Even though the barrel distortion with the GRDII is minimal, it too has to be corrected with post-processing for serious results. The ease of using LensFix really puts aside the whole issue of lens distortion, and makes a prime lens lover reconsider the attraction of the zoom.
This simple and quick test makes me re-evaluate camera technology and ways of taking pictures. Let’s just hope that in future cameras lens distortion correction happens in-camera, without you noticing a thing. And let’s also hope that Lightroom adopts the invaluable perspective cropping from PS.
For a more everyday use, I wanted to find a decent pocket camera with a similarly wide angle high quality lens, and there was no other alternative than the Ricoh GX100. It’s an impressive little camera, and works beautifully even for serious architectural photography, with a little help from some basic software. Small sensor noise is not an issue with this type of shooting, which is low ISO, anyway. And small sensor huge depth-of-field is pretty handy, indeed.
My example shows two images. The starting point is a very casual, underexposed, hand held shot on a dark and depressive day, with a seriously tilted perspective, in order to fit the whole building in the frame. This dng file was first processed in Lightroom with basic tonal adjustments. From Lightroom, a quick external (TIFF) edit in LensFix CI (for mac, =PTLens for PC), to get rid of the barrel distortion. This inexpensive software has specific presets for the GX100, and it does the job in a flash, automatically. After (and only after) LensFix, another external edit in Photoshop (perspective crop), and final adjustments in Lightroom (which is the unnecessary extra here).
With this test, I also used the wide angle converter. It’s a quality product, but it shows minor softness at the other(!) end of the frame. The 24mm equiv. wide end of the zoom is wide enough for most architectural work, but the 19mm option is a treat. The pocketable 24mm, by the way, makes the GX100 an easy choice over the GRDII with its 28mm (/21mm), or any other 28mm quality pocket camera, for that matter. Even though the barrel distortion with the GRDII is minimal, it too has to be corrected with post-processing for serious results. The ease of using LensFix really puts aside the whole issue of lens distortion, and makes a prime lens lover reconsider the attraction of the zoom.
This simple and quick test makes me re-evaluate camera technology and ways of taking pictures. Let’s just hope that in future cameras lens distortion correction happens in-camera, without you noticing a thing. And let’s also hope that Lightroom adopts the invaluable perspective cropping from PS.