Ricoh R10 Review

If you've been reading my blog for a while you know that I really enjoyed using the Ricoh R10 and think it's a very nice camera. It is in my opinion the best R series camera so far and one of the best built cameras from Ricoh.
It follows Ricoh's tradition of cameras you enjoy using. This for me is the most important thing and way more important than silly features and even than image quality since none of these take good or interesting pictures. Read my full review of it here.

Water Feature

GRD, f5, 1/320, ISO 1600, JPG

While walking home I came across this new "water feature" in Greenwich. A water main must have broken so it was flooding the street around but made for a nice picture.
Now if you ask why I used ISO 1600 instead of a much lower ISO, this is because I like how the camera handles the color and together with using contrast at +2 and color depth at -2 gave me the result I wanted. I removed what little color noise there was with Noise Ninja but left the luminance noise alone.

Man in Yellow

GRD, f7.1, 1/640, ISO 400, JPG

After taking a break from street photography I have another picture from today. This time however it's not a b&w but color picture. I think it is important to keep changing the themes and style every now and then so as not to become stale and repetitive. This is why I enjoy having different cameras, each with a slightly different look and feel.

9

LC1, f2, 1/5, ISO 200, RAW, 28mm

Took it easy today and just went for a walk to Greenwich Park and the Observatory there. It was nice but I got told off for taking pictures since some of the things are copyrighted, even this staircase is off limits for photography but I already took that shot. Should you have been following my blog you would have noticed two other pictures (the last one only two weeks ago) taken in the Observatory so this rule must be new. I will never understand the reason to limit photography and will never support it. What I do support is limiting people to use their flash everywhere but this is a different matter.

Relaxed

LC1, f2.4, 1/25, ISO 200, RAW, 90mm

Continuing my blurry pictures series this year, I took this with the Panasonic LC1. This time however it was blurry on purpose since I found it gives a better feel to the picture. It is part of a series of pictures I took at a wedding today.
Used mostly the LC1 for this since it has great dynamic range and very good controls but is a bit slow when writing RAW and the focus also needs to be faster for this kind of photography. It compares very favorably however with the RD1 and both cameras have a similar look and image quality.

Cradle

GRD II, f2.4, 1/10, ISO 400, RAW, 1:1

I had a strange day today. Although I went out with the intention to take pictures, equipped with the R10 and GRD II, I did not manage to take any sharp pictures. For some reason most if not all my pictures suffered from camera shake. This does not happen often and I was quite surprised to see this afterwards. I also did not have too much coffee in the morning and I did not spice my coffee with any alcohol either ;).
This is a picture from the GRD II since I haven't used it for quite some time and although it also has slight camera shake (and this time it was not done on purpose) I do quite like the outcome after some processing to give it the look I imagined when taking it.

Portrait Lens

Ok, since I had time today and nothing better to do I decided to see which camera/lens combination is best for portraits. I took the GRD II with 40mm lens, GX200 and LC1 which were both set at 50mm to give a comparable result. The 'I, Robot' head was around 30cm away from the cameras. All cameras were shot wide open so the GRD II at f2.4, GX200 at f3.5 and LC1 at f2.1.
Unsurprisingly, the LC1 gives the most pleasing bokeh and has a shallower DOF than the Ricoh cameras due to it's larger sensor, also the 28mm lens is not really suited for this and gives a big DOF. What was surprising though is that there is hardly any difference between the GRD II at f2.4 and GX200 at f3.5 and both look very similar, I had expected the GX200 to have a bigger DOF.