Trip to India

I am going to take the GR-D on a trip to India next week. We will see if the stubborn dust speck on the sensor gets dislodged during the journey. If it doesn't I am going to call Ricoh and see what they say about it.

One thing I found when I started using the GR Digital is that it opened up a whole new world of possibilities to me. As someone who had moved from an ETRS medium format system, through to MF rangefinders and then ending up with the Canon 5D, the GR-D is a joy to use as it can be taken anywhere and it allows you to shoot things that would actually be impossible with a bigger camera. The quality of the pictures is fine up to about 11x14 and even beyond. Some people are printing huge prints from the GR-D. For example see the discussion here.

Using the GR-D also opened up my eyes to doing other things with a camera than just trying to shoot fantastically sharp photos with no grain. In fact I have hardly used my Canon since. I have also begun to use toy cameras and old vintage folding medium format cameras that can be had off ebay for few dollars. I have started another blog about this experience here. If you are interested in toy cameras and vintage cameras check it out sometime.

These were taken with a plastic $20 modified Holga camera:

Potted Plant


Garden Hose

More dust on the GR-D?

Image with large dust spot
Originally uploaded by beachedvinyl.

In response to a post I put on Flickr, someone else has a very similar issue to me with their GR-D. It is uncannily similar. It is even in an almost identical place. Click on the image for larger views.

At least this only seems to be a problem at very small apertures, and we all know that small apertures are not usually needed with a camera like this to get huge depth of field. The other thing to note is that beachedvinyl was the only other other person on the Flickr GR-D group to notice the problem. Hence it is either not very noticeable for most people or more likely not a very common problem. So it shouldn't really put people off buying this camera.

Dust on the GR Digital sensor

As I said in my previous post I have occasionally seen dust specks on my GR-D sensor, but these tend to disappear after a while. I have a much more stubborn spot now which I began to notice on my recent photographs from my trip to Greece. It only shows up really noticeably at small apertures, but is a rather big spot of dirt/oil or whatever.

Here is a photo at f/9 showing the spot in the sky area. There is also a less noticeable, but similar, spot on the right of the one highlighted in the sky just above the houses (near the TV aerial). Click on the photo to go to bigger viewing options via Flickr (click on 'all sizes').



Here is a crop:



While this is easy enough to fix in Photoshop it is still annoying as there is no way to clean the sensor yourself. The camera seems to have rather poor weather sealing. Although thankfully the dust doesn't show up at wider apertures. f/4 if fine, but by f/5.6 you can see it.

Back from Greece with GR Digital

I took the GR-D to Greece and it performed pretty well in very harsh contrasty conditions. I am now beginning to process the files. One problem that has arisen is that I am getting some dirt on the sensor and there is obviously no way you clean the sensor yourself.

Here are some examples of street photography from the trip (click on the picture for the full view).

Man outside a shop, Tinos Town




Man in Taverna, Tinos Town




Man selling religious wares, Tinos Town




Girl on scooter, Tinos Town




Priest, Pirgos



All these were taken in normal colour mode (jpeg), mostly ISO 64, and processed in Convert to Black and White Pro 3. These and more can be seen here.