The Sun was back

After several weeks of grey life, today all colors were back thanks to a nice sun and clear sky. Luckly I had the Ricoh with me so I didn't miss the opportunity to use it.

I'm very happy about the colors from the GRD III, I don't know and I don't care if the Ricoh colors match perfectly the theoretical ones. I like them.

I keep converting the raw files with Lightroom 3, again just becasue I like it.

I'm almost totally conviced to have found my ideal combination of hardware and software. Just few shots more to clear out any doubt.

Walking and Landscaping

28mm is indeed a wide lens so formally indicated for landscape photography, so no real surprise here but I still believe it's worth to mention it.

Even if I do not particularly love to capture landscapes, I like to compose images in an urban environment using its geometries. And when you do that by moving yourself around the result comes out always better than by using a zoom.

I strongly doubt I would ever have been able to compose two pictures of different location in so similar way as the one of today and the one in the previous post.

Apart the prime lens, the GRD III has a great gadget for landscapers: the level indicator. No more inclined horizon lines to be corrected by rotation in develop phase.

I'm not a gadget freak but I really appreciate that feature which save me time in post processing. Some times I spend minutes to straighten the horizon, but than again that's probably just me.

Yachts on Ice

Sunday afternoon I went out one more time to have a walk around e nice marina close to home.
It was a real nice atmosphere.

I spent quite some hours developing this photo in LR3 but I ended up just increasing a bit the color saturation.
I liked the image coming from the GRD III, any modification of all various parameters was simply not adding any value.
Maybe a LR expert user could have a totaly different opinion.

Definitely winter

Today the winter is once again rembering us that it is still January.

Snow, wind, leaden sky are not ideal conditions to spent much time outside to familiarize with a new camera but such a light condition is perfect to understand a camera dynamic range.

So packed as an antartic explorer, I went out early in the morning and here below you can see the catch of the day.

Shortly after the first shots, it started snowing seriuosly, too much to stay outside so I went back home to develop the .dng files.

As I'm not a real fan of post processing, until today I used only DPP (Digital Photo Professional from Canon) for my pictures and now it was mandatory to look for a different raw developer.

Considering various online suggestions about the best DNG developer for the GRD III, I narrowed the choice to the free downloadable Raw Therapee and the under testing Adobe Lightroom 3 Beta.

I just tried both of them and for now LR3 seems to be the preferred choice but before getting to a final decision I will have to use them both much longer than one day.

As a start, I can say that I'm quite satisfied by the results of this first short shooting experience.

The need of a new experience

After a few years of being a happy Canon DSLR user (EOS 400D, EOS 50D with various prime and zoom lenses), I realized I started to neglect the fundamental aspects of photography. I was relying too much on the equipment due to its good performances and comfortable settings. It was getting too easy, I was loosing interest and the quality of my pictures was decreasing.
The gear dimension and weight didn't help to improve my mood so as result I was leaving my cameras at home more and more often.
I was on the right way to loose interest in photography almost without realizing it.

Around the end of last year I decided it was time for a radical change, I needed a more difficult tool which would force me to learn again the joy of photography and which I could bring with me every day without problems.
I spent few weeks to identify the shortlist of suitable cameras and at the end without any doubt I ordered one Ricoh GR Digital III.
Within the not many alternatives (Sigma DP2, various micro 4/3, still on the way Leica X1), the GRD III was the one which I fell in love with. In a later post, I will write more about the rational and emotional reasons behind this choice of mine.

This blog is about a new photographic experience, about  the relationship between the photographer and his camera.
It is not about technical digital details such noise at 200% crop but about emotions and feeling.