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GRD2 with 40mm Tele-converter pictures

simonclivehughes

Active member
Ah, excellent tip about the 2-second timer delay. I'll have to try that. Typically, I carry a small home-made leather beanbag and/or a Manfrotto table-top tripod for shots this slow. Although I can see a bit of posterization in the top picture's sky, it may be due to the reduced size, I just got my GRDII yesterday so I'm looking forward to trying out this weekend. I always shoot RAW but I've got the jpg set to fine, so I'll have a look at them.

Cheers,
 
M

Mitch Alland

Guest
OK, Now that a spend a day in streets of New York, with the GV-2 viewfinder, I just can't imagine using the GR II without it, especially in low light situations, when I am forced to shoot at a slower shutter speed...
All this is personal preference: I like shooting using the LCD monitor much better, which I feel gives a looser, more fluid, shooting style. I just use the LCD to establish the edges of the frame and usually look directly at the subject when pressing the shutter.

—Mitch/Bangkok
http://www.flickr.com/photos/10268776@N00/
 
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Mitch Alland

Guest
This is a stunning shot. It has been haunting me since I first saw it.
Thanks for the the kind words; I like this portrait as well. This young woman usually has a happy face with a broad smile; but when I shot a dozen pictures of her she posed with a more brooding, moody look, that revealed much more depth to her personality, the happier look being the public face that we usually wear.

—Mitch/Bangkok
http://www.flickr.com/photos/10268776@N00/
 

Will

New member
Ordered a GT-1 today. Should help with portraits.

Does my nose look big in this lens? (28mm)

 
V

VladimirV

Guest
I got my lens today and went out during lunch to take some shots and am really impressed with the quality. There is flare but only in a few shots and at certain angles. I will post some images later today.
 

helenhill

Senior Member
Does my nose look big in this lens? (28mm)

Can you repeat the question Pinocchio / :bugeyes:
All the Best.......
 
P

Player

Guest
Nice shots Mitch!

You have an eye for the pretty ladies too. :)
 
M

Mitch Alland

Guest
Thanks, Player; thanks Lili.

Perhaps I should mention something about the difference in shooting with a 40 and a 28mm EFL lens. Obviously the feeling of space created by these two focal length is quite different, as you can see from a picture of the same young market woman as in the last picture above that I took a month ago with the GRD2 (28mm EFL):

ISO 800



What I find interesting now is that, having got so used to street photography with the 28mm EFL, a focal length I simply did not used before getting a GRD some 18 months ago, I find that now I'm so used to coming in very close to shoot. This means that I now feel "cramped" with the 40mm EFL in that I've usually come in too close for the type of shot that I want with this lens. This is really why the 28mm EFL is so good for street photography: being closer you tend to "understand" and observe the action or the scene better, which can lead to better pictures. But the longer focal length is particularly good for certain types of portraits and for situations in which you simply cannot get as close as you need for a wider angle lens.

—Mitch/Bangkok
http://www.flickr.com/photos/10268776@N00/
 
H

Hypnohare

Guest
All this is personal preference: I like shooting using the LCD monitor much better, which I feel gives a looser, more fluid, shooting style. I just use the LCD to establish the edges of the frame and usually look directly at the subject when pressing the shutter.

—Mitch/Bangkok
http://www.flickr.com/photos/10268776@N00/
Yes, Mitch, I also like to shoot with the LCD, especially when I want to be quick and discreet. But if I am in low-light and without a tripod, I have been getting better results with the optical viewfinder. In any case, I will keep the GV-2 on the camera, so I can be prepared for any occasion and the new GC-2 case makes it very easy to carry everything safely.

I did recently purchase the 40mm lens, But I have not yet been inspired to use it. Perhaps it's because I spent the last three years with a pocket camera with a 38mm lens and at the moment I am going crazy with the wide angle look of the Ricoh's built-in 28mm prime?

Anyhow, I love what you are doing with the Black & White, your pictures just look great!!!

I have very little experience with shooting monochrome (although I loved studying Ansel Adams books, especially "the Negative" when I was a young man), but unfortunately I spent most of my time with color film.

Looking at your photos makes me want to explore the B&W capability of the GR II more than I have.
 
S

Sean_Reid

Guest
This is really why the 28mm EFL is so good for street photography: being closer you tend to "understand" and observe the action or the scene better, which can lead to better pictures. But the longer focal length is particularly good for certain types of portraits and for situations in which you simply cannot get as close as you need for a wider angle lens.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/10268776@N00/
Hi Mitch,

Specifically, and I imagine that this is what you meant, that is why the 28 works better for you personally. A century of photography, however, has shown us what it possible with 35 and 50 mm lenses when one is photographing people in public places. "Cramped" is in the eye of the beholder. Kertesz was far from cramped with a 50, for example.

To use a 28 up close, one also has to accept, and like, a good amount of perspective exaggeration (which we tend to read as distortion). That's a personal call as well.

Cheers,

Sean
 
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Will

New member
Mitch I find your 40mm images tend more towards a feeling of intimacy than the 28mm, I wonder if that is the effect of your not having fully adjusted to the lens yet or if it is a fundamental difference between the focal lengths?

Oh, and thanks for bringing us back on topic.
 
A

Arch

Guest
This thread is getting rather interesting in many respects. People are happily surprised to find the new perspectives offered by the wide and tele converters attached to their pocket cameras. Yet, their pocket cameras are no longer pocket cameras, and their lovely prime lenses with their faultless optical engineering are being destroyed by compromise quality extra glass.

It seems to me that the Leica heritage is playing a central role here, again. Prime lenses are, of course, and still, the state of the art, but a lot of water has run under the bridge since zoom lenses were a synonym of mediocre optical quality. The minor optical distortions unavoidable with the zoom lenses (barrel/pincushion) can now be taken care of by post processing, which we do anyway.

When zoom is accepted, the step zoom, like the on Ricoh GX100, is given a big hand, mainly because it's almost like using prime lenses with their familiar focal lengths (I see the point with the optical viewfinders, but who really wants to buy all four of them and change them all the time? Yet, I'd love to see which focal length I'm using also with the normal zoom).

Another thread here is asking if we walk or zoom. Sometimes the space gets too limited for us to walk, and zooming becomes a very attractive option. Without zoom, we are forced to ask: do you crop? Another tough question for the Leica traditionalists. Cropping a digital image? Isn't it like using the d i g i t a l z o o m ?

Lovely Thai pics, again.
 

Lili

New member
This thread is getting rather interesting in many respects. People are happily surprised to find the new perspectives offered by the wide and tele converters attached to their pocket cameras. Yet, their pocket cameras are no longer pocket cameras, and their lovely prime lenses with their faultless optical engineering are being destroyed by compromise quality extra glass.



It seems to me that the Leica heritage is playing a central role here, again. Prime lenses are, of course, and still, the state of the art, but a lot of water has run under the bridge since zoom lenses were a synonym of mediocre optical quality. The minor optical distortions unavoidable with the zoom lenses (barrel/pincushion) can now be taken care of by post processing, which we do anyway.

When zoom is accepted, the step zoom, like the on Ricoh GX100, is given a big hand, mainly because it's almost like using prime lenses with their familiar focal lengths (I see the point with the optical viewfinders, but who really wants to buy all four of them and change them all the time? Yet, I'd love to see which focal length I'm using also with the normal zoom).

Another thread here is asking if we walk or zoom. Sometimes the space gets too limited for us to walk, and zooming becomes a very attractive option. Without zoom, we are forced to ask: do you crop? Another tough question for the Leica traditionalists. Cropping a digital image? Isn't it like using the d i g i t a l z o o m ?

Lovely Thai pics, again.
Arch, the GW-1 and GT-1 really give very high optical quality, while they do add bulk they do not 'destroy' anything at all.
 
M

Mitch Alland

Guest
Thanks, Hypnohare.

Sean, yes, I'm expressing my own preferences here. It's certainly true that in the 1930s through 1950s, and even well into the 1960s, is was the 35 and 50mm lenses that were used for most street photography, but don't forget that while Leica made it's first 28mm lens (the f6.3 Hektor) in 1935 it didn't make another one (the f5.6 Summaron) until twenty years later, in 1955; and they produced their first fast 28mm (the f2.8 Elmarit) only in 1965. Ralph Gibson wrote or said in an interview that he preferred a more natural feeling of space than produced by wide-angle lenses, that he preferred to create the space himself rather than have a "lensy" space — and, indeed, it's quite difficult to produce a Ralph Gibson type of picture with a lens wider than 50mm. In my own case, not having looked much at Winogrand, I got interested in the 28mm and 21mm focal length after studying the work of Moriyama Daido. And when I started to use the 28mm EFL of the GRD I found it hard going at first.


Mitch I find your 40mm images tend more towards a feeling of intimacy than the 28mm, I wonder if that is the effect of your not having fully adjusted to the lens yet or if it is a fundamental difference between the focal lengths?...
Will, I don't think that it's a difference between the focal lengths that accounts for this; rather, it's how you approach the subject because you can achieve intimacy with the 28 and 21mm EFLs as well, as in the following picture taken with the GRD2 at 28mm EFL at ISO 1600:





And here's an example with the 21mm converter on the GRD (ISO 64):





The effect, that is, the degree of intimacy achieved with wide-angle lenses depends often on how you treat the space: closing up the back plane as in the two pictures above will enhance the closeness, or intimacy, if you will. But, that is not a hard and fast rule, as you can see in some of Bill Brandt's portraits taken with the Hasselblad SWC, like the one of Francis Bacon, which has intimacy despite the perspective going off into infinity. Therefore, I think it's all in the feeling the photograopher has for the subject and how he frames this.

—Mitch/Bangkok
http://www.flickr.com/photos/10268776@N00/
 
M

Mitch Alland

Guest
...Yet, their pocket cameras are no longer pocket cameras, and their lovely prime lenses with their faultless optical engineering are being destroyed by compromise quality extra glass...
Thanks, Arch.

Yes, my mother always taught me that converter lenses were crummy pieces of glass that destroyed the look of the fine lens to which they were attached. But she was wrong: the 21mm wide-converter and the 40mm tele-converter are excellent lenses and don't compromise the quality of the original 28mm EFL lens: that is what I was trying to show in the examples above. To me, the quality of the 21mm converter is simply astounding and the 40mm is also excellent, although it sometimes has a bit of flare that I don't find to be a problem — there was no fare in the pictures above. It certainly flares a lot less than the DR-Summicron, one of my favorite lenses for the Leica-M.

As for pocketability, the tele-converter (the GT-1), like the 21mm wide-converter (the GW-1) needs a little "barrel" to be mounted on the GRD or GRD2. Wearing the camera in its case on my belt I can carry the GT-1, GW-1 and the barrel in my left trouser pocket — and a spare battery in my back pocket. Once either converter is mounted on the camera it becomes too big to be pocketable, although it would still fit in a largish jacket packet; but it's too hot in Bangkok to wear a jacket.

Once you have the GT-1 mounted on the camera you can simply unscrew it and leave the barrel on if you want to shoot at 28mm EFL, and then you can also screw on the GW-1 and easily switch between the latter and the GT-1: this makes it convenient to swtich between the three focal lengths.

An unrelated thought: I really like the 40mm focal length, which is one that Mike Johnston once raved about and wrote about extensively and eloquently— in better days when he wasn't burying himself in his blog. (No offense, in the sense that I've written him a couple of times that with his talent for writing he could do a lot more interesting things as his main activity than maintain a blog, but let's stay on topic...) The 40mm lens combines properties or capabilities of the 35 and 50mm focal length and, therefore, is a good complement to the 28 and 21mm focal length that the GRD and GRD2 already have. I like the choice of focal lengths that Ricoh Camera has made because the 35mm focal length is close to 28mm — and thus having the choice of 21, 28 and 40 is very useful, as it obviates the need for the 35 and 50mm focal lenghts, as least for me, as I don't like to use to many lenses — with my Leica M6 I found that the number of good pictures I managed to take was inversely proportional to the number of lenses I carried any particular day.

Although it may be obvious, the choice of the 21, 28 and 40mm EFL is a very practical solution for extending the flexibility of these cameras; and the ability to use the wide and tele converters on both the old GRD and the new GRD2 is a welcome development.

—Mitch/Bangkok
http://www.flickr.com/photos/10268776@N00/
 
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S

Sean_Reid

Guest
(I see the point with the optical viewfinders, but who really wants to buy all four of them and change them all the time? Yet, I'd love to see which focal length I'm using also with the normal zoom).
Me...I do and did. But I also don't change focal lengths all the time.

Cheers,

Sean
 
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Sean_Reid

Guest
Thanks, Hypnohare.

Sean, yes, I'm expressing my own preferences here. It's certainly true that in the 1930s through 1950s, and even well into the 1960s, is was the 35 and 50mm lenses that were used for most street photography
Hi Mitch,

....Also 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and our present decade. Why did you stop at the 1960s? But strong work is timeless and the contention between form and content is exactly the same now as it was when we were drawing on cave walls.

As I think you might agree, there's no best format, no best focal length, no best aspect ratio, etc. There's the just the photographer, the subject and whatever tools he or she chooses to use to mediate between the two. A good friend of mine is doing outstanding work on the streets of NYC with a 90 on an R-D1.

Cheers,

Sean
 
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