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Ricoh GR-D II Photo Blog

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PIXIllate

Guest
Been shooting with the GR-D II for a few months now. Getting use to what a small sensor has to offer. It's let me shoot more by having the camra with me at all times. That has to be a good thing. Lot's of photos here:

http://blackandwhiteviews.blogspot.com/
 

Will

New member
Very inspiring work.
Timely reminder whilst we contemplate the wealth of new cameras we are constantly tempted by that it is our photographic eye that is the really important element.
 
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Lili

New member
Lovely work, like the B&W and the slice-of-life-style. Like glimpses of scene from a film, one wonders at the lives we glimpsed and what happens afterwards....
 
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PIXIllate

Guest
Thanks for the comments. The more I use this camera, the less I think about technical perfection and I just focus on looking for moments. Small and portable trumps IQ to some degree with this kind of shooting. It's fine for 8x12ish prints.

Settings? Usually ISO100-400 f/4.5 1/1600th-1-500th. I find if you use ISO100-200 you can risk underexposing and just bring it back up in post instead of blowing highlights which are then gone. All shot with .DNG and processed through ACR and Silver Efx Plugin. Also quite a few of those were shot with the 40mm conversion lens.

Not sure if that answers you questions or not.
 

sizifo

New member
Just looked at your blog - and this is my very first impression . While many of the photos are really very good, what I find slightly disturbing in many of them is that the shadows are noisy while the highlights aren't. Must be related to the underexposing, as you explained above.

Which converter are you using? I use aperture and find it excellent for highlight recovery. It can save a stop with the GRDII (not GRDI). Of course, you may want the effect, in which case this comment is irrelevant.

Having said this, one still needs to make a choice whether to expose more for shadows or highlights with the small sensor cameras. GRDII is quite good, but I usually keep it on manual, because getting the exposure as desired is very important. Still you generally have to sacrifice something.
 
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PIXIllate

Guest
"shadows are noisy while the highlights aren't"

All digital capture devices are that way. It's one of the signatures of digital really. I process for expressive images that print well and got over pixel peeping long ago. I own a D300 and it is what I use for all of my color shooting, both studio and natural light.

The GR-D II is a tool just like any other and you need to learn how to use it for what it can do and not try to get it to do something another tool would be better suited for. It's with me all the time, let's me be discrete and for street shooting that trumps noise in the shadows for me. Especially since I'm processing the images for such high contrast. ACR is the best converter for highlight recovery but small senor cameras just don't hold enough information to get back much beyond 1/2 to 2/3 of a stop. Personally I prefer the final tonality of using slight underexposure and having smoother mid and highlight tones since I am crushing the black anyways. Plus with the local contrast adjustments most of these photo's are subjected to I need more values through that range to leave something in tact after my somewhat heavy handed processing. I am achieving the look I want for these photos. I realize it is not for everybody. I shoot lots of perfectly exposed and well lit photos when I set out to. On the street I'm looking for life in the process of living, and that usually happens too fast for technical considerations.

The camera is very responsive when used in full manual mode and zone focused. Most of the moments I have shot with it would have been gone before I made ANY adjustments to my camera other than framing and pressing the shutter. I'll take a blurry shot of a great moment over a sharp shot of the next second any day.
 
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PIXIllate

Guest
One neat trick I forgot to mention is that if you are in full manual mode and the light changes dramatically you can hit the zoom up/down buttons once and the camera will adjust the shutter speed to zero out the meter. It helped the other day when I was shooting in a store and walked outside and right into a conversation on the sidewalk. Without lifting the camera I knew I could hit that button by feel and the exposure would be close.
 

sizifo

New member
"shadows are noisy while the highlights aren't"

All digital capture devices are that way. It's one of the signatures of digital really. I process for expressive images that print well and got over pixel peeping long ago. I own a D300 and it is what I use for all of my color shooting, both studio and natural light.
I agree. What I meant was "shadows are very very noisy, highlights aren't" in a few of the photos. You choose to exaggerate the effect, but I do see the logic in your approach now that you've explained. I wasn't pixelpeeping, just looking at the jpegs on your webpage. Anyhow, it is just a small aesthetic disagreement about a minority of your photos.

Are you on flickr ?

One neat trick I forgot to mention is that if you are in full manual mode and the light changes dramatically you can hit the zoom up/down buttons once and the camera will adjust the shutter speed to zero out the meter. It helped the other day when I was shooting in a store and walked outside and right into a conversation on the sidewalk. Without lifting the camera I knew I could hit that button by feel and the exposure would be close.
Yup. Extremely useful, and missing on the grdI. For some reason on my camera it is the fn button that gets assigned this role. Also, if anybody is wondering why they can't get it to work, this was added only in recent firmware.
 
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PIXIllate

Guest
I also add some grain with the Silver Efx plugin. Usually a tweaked version of the TRI-X
 
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