Note: the apparent vignetting visible on some of these scans from small prints wasn't so apparent on the originals - it's not a fault of the lens, but rather an artifact from my scanner.
Did I regret it? Well, no, as it turned out.
I am very fond of my trusty AF SLR, and have never before gone off on a trip without it. I intended to take it right up to packing my suitcase, but after the surgery on my spine to partially correct an old injury, I had to leave out even light weight Christmas gifts to avoid lifting too much. In the end there simply was no choice, so, despite reservations, my big camera stayed home.
My sister Susan drove us to Karchner Caverns State Park, near Benson, Arizona, at the foot of the Whetstone Mountains. Since we had a few hours before our turn in the caverns (well worth a visit), we strolled around one of the footpaths there at the park. The morning light and clouds that day were magnificent. For this first landscape (above) I spot-metered on the sun-lit face of the hill.
Above: this is exactly what this ridge looks like practically every evening, though finding an angle that doesn't show the bulldozer scars on the lower slopes is tricky. (There should be a capital offence of "reckless development." Not too long ago this was designated a wilderness area with its population of rare Bighorn Mountain Sheep, now so rare as to be virtually non-existant.)
I set the camera to Infinity mode and just snapped it from the moving car.
Left to right, above and below: Bumblebee, Arizona. This stone building is built on the foundations of an older stage stop on the original road from Prescott, then the main town before Phoenix existed. The next pic is my brother Pat and his wife Linda - cabinet and furniture makers extraordinaire - outside the Crown King Cafe in Crown King, Arizona.
The old dirt road through the Bradshaw Mountains from Prescott to Crown King and beyond is the same today as it was when I grew up there. These old truck and car bodies are well peppered with bullet holes. Past Crown King, out of the mountains and into the desert below, is the town (or, rather, a few shacks loosely clustered around a saloon/cafe/general store) of Cleator. These houses are the residences of local prospectors. I thought it was a ghost town until we got closer and you could see the TV antennae.
The last time I hiked up this rugged canyon in the Santa Catalinas
north of Tucson was about 12 years ago. We're headed for the other side
of the pointy rock hill in the middle there. On that previous walk I
carried one or two SLR bodies, a spot meter and three lenses - not this
time!
A major dislike of mine about most autofocusing compact cameras is
their annoying shutter lag - the half second or so between pressing the
button and the shutter actually opening. I would never buy one; they're
just too frustrating. You can only take photographs of static or posed
subjects. I have no idea what the designers were thinking; they must
never have heard of the decisive moment in photography. There are even
several "posh" compacts that suffer from shutter lag.
Well,
thankfully the Ricoh designer had more sense. The GR1's lens focuses at
first press of the shutter button (the other R and GR series Ricohs
including the R1 all have pre-set focus modes).
For a virtually real-time (instantaneous) shutter release set the
camera to one of the pre-set focus positions. This picture illustrates
what I mean. There was only one chance, and it's timed exactly as
intended. With practically any other compact camera, Kevin would have
been on all fours, ignominiously spread-eagled on the wet, slippery
rocks instead of caught in mid-leap.
I used Fixed Focus mode here, but Snap mode and Infinity mode work in
the same way. You have to remember that if you're using flash, the
flash exposure will only be correct at around 2 meters (6½ feet)
for Snap mode, and the flash will be full power in Infinity mode. So,
use Fixed Focus mode for precise flash exposures at other distances.
Here's another snap
that would have been impossible with shutter lag, shot as the car was
accelerating through the Tucson traffic lights. I wanted to show this
poor (but honest) homeless guy to my family when I got home. (It's
cropped a fair bit here for screen visibility).
Focus mode set to Infinity.
A 28mm lens is hardly ideal for close-ups, but at least
the GR cameras can focus as close as a very respectable 1.1
feet (35cm). You can pretty much fill the width of the frame with an
A4/letter-sized page. (The R10 focuses even closer, to 8 inches/20cm.)
This butterfly (a Pipevine Swallowtail) got increasingly nervous as I moved closer - the camera had some difficulty focusing on the small branch or the moving insect. Maybe I got too close at times; the AF warnings are identical for "too close" and "unable to focus."
Things look further away in the finder than they really are, making it hard to judge how close you really are. So when the AF brackets flash, it's hard to tell if it's because the camera can't achieve focus or if you're ever so slightly too close. If you're too close the shutter locks; if the camera can't grab focus, focus reverts to 8.2 feet (2.5m).
In my limited experience, close up things like printed pages are easy to focus on, while small objects are not. My guess is that this is because the focusing brackets in the finder don't shift for parallax - the focusing system looks at an area near or possibly below the bottom edge of the focusing brackets. (Since the viewfinder is centered over the lens, it's probably directly below by about half the width of the active parallax bar across the top of the finder, but could be a little to the right as well, since that's where the AF sensors are.)
Having said that, the
AF system is usually untroubled by most close-ups. Occasionally, it may
have trouble determining what one's intentions are with small subjects
isolated from the background or in motion, especially where the
background is visually cluttered. I rotate the camera to align it with
vertical lines on or adjacent to the subject, and usually try wide
(multi-point) AF first; only switching to spot AF (Single Autofocus
mode) if that doesn't work. Sometimes the normal wide-area AF works
better; sometimes not.
This picture (above) of my parents' wedding photograph was
absolutely no problem for the GR1's focusing system.
This was as close as it would get, shot in Normal mode with wide area
AF (don't forget to use the close-up framing lines in the finder).
Focusing
precisely on one part of a general scene, especially with wide angle
lenses, is not only not necessary, it doesn't always give the best
picture. It's often better to have the whole of a scene, from front to
back, all within the lens's depth-of-field. This is the beauty of
Ricoh's default focus setting for whenever the AF system can't catch
focus, and it's also the rationale behind Snap mode.
Left: since foreground sharpness is important on
this view of the mountains, it was simply shot in Snap mode.
The GR1 shoots even when it hasn't caught focus. This isn't a bad thing - it's effectively an automatic Snap mode, and can mean the difference between getting a grab shot or not. The Contax Tix just locks up in the same situation, which to me is daft - there are bound to be real-world situations where the subject matter is less than ideal for even the best passive autofocusing mechanism. Manual camera users will know about setting lenses to intermediate distances using depth-of-field scales; these Ricohs effectively emulate this automatically.
Above left: my brother Pat and a bookshelf he made (painting by Carolyn). Straight program; auto flash, no other light but the lamp.
Right: more subtle lighting; my friend Carolyn at work. Straight program mode; flash ON. There's a wildly varied mix of light in this one, yet it's perfectly balanced by the GR1.
You can tell if back lighting is strong enough to cancel a GR1's Auto flash by whether or not the red (flash status) LED alongside the finder lights up; if not, you may have to switch the flash to ON - if you do, remember that if it's dark enough, and you then set a specific aperture (for example, opening up the lens to extend the flash range), the camera will be in Slow Synchro mode.
Above left: I was amazed to find a band playing on the Sunday we stopped at the Crown King Cafe for lunch; they were surprisingly good, too. They started with a jazz version of Van Morrison's "Moondance," and as we were leaving they were into "Harlem Nocturne." There was only one other customer in the place besides us, and you had to come 35 miles on dirt roads (very rough coming from the north) in either direction to get there, and that's just where the pavement ends - the nearest towns are much further away. For this photo the flash was on Auto (i.e. no Slow Synchro) and the aperture was set using the out-of-range warnings. The musicians are just beyond the range of the flash, which provided the light on the foreground posts.
Right: In a small cafe in Tucson. My mother doesn't like this shot, but I do (it has a bit of character). My SLR couldn't have done this picture automatically; the subject is off-center, and my SLR has just a single central OTF light sensor to control exposures. It would have to be set manually using the correct aperture for the subject distance.
My dad loves his horses. Here he is caught by GR1 flash after attending
to them one night. Outside it was pitch dark. The interior lighting is
exposed perfectly; straight Program mode. The dark red AF assist light
was active for this one.
Right:
I took two shots of my friend Carolyn's work, one with and one without
flash. This is the better of the two, with flash. There was some
overhead electric lighting plus daylight through a studio window. The
paintings are of fantasy ladies' shoes made from cactus, as are the
renditions of famous designer chairs in the portfolio at left (great
stuff).
This painting is done on a piece of old scrap sheet metal. It's one of
Carolyn's anagram series: "Savage Agaves." Each leaf is a different but
authentic agave leaf from around the world. (There's also a "Utopian
Opuntias" series.)
The photo illustrates the GR1 viewfinder's framing accuracy. I took extra care with this one and the resulting print, although you don't get the full frame with machine prints, was pretty much spot-on.
These fawns are
incredibly cute - so gentle and graceful. One is a Mule Deer, the other
is a Whitetail. If you should ever happen to come across a small fawn
curled up motionless in the grass, never assume it's been
abandoned and "rescue" it. The mother will invariably be nearby. They
leave the camouflaged fawns during the day while they go off to feed.
Deer raised in captivity can easily become too tame to be released into
the wild, and are very often the first casualties come next hunting
season. These two were tame already; there are 9 others being raised at
T & J Farms (Catalina, Arizona) who are as yet still wild; but they
should never have been picked up in the first place.
Anyway, I include this shot as an example of one-handed shooting. AF compacts are great for this.
It doesn't take long to appreciate the GR1's own peculiar brand of
versatility; I was shooting through windshields and carried it
everywhere on my belt or in a pocket, day and night, indoors and out.
It's so light you don't notice it.
I still sometimes have trouble deciding how to set the GR1 for certain situations. It is possible to make a wrong choice, though often it doesn't matter - the camera copes regardless. When I find myself wondering which setting to use - without knowing exactly what the camera will do sometimes - I only have to remind myself how much easier it is to set things on a GR1 than on other "posh" AF compact cameras, whose controls are frankly atrocious by comparison; I don't have the patience for them.
This large, very macho Wolf Spider turned up in the shower one night. It had beautiful thick fur and moved so fast it seemed to disappear and re-appear somewhere else. I couldn't find it in any of the 5 or 6 books I looked in to identify it (some type of Huntsman?). Although I had to crop the original print so the spider would show up here, the GR1 yet again focused instantly and exposed the flash perfectly in a situation my SLR would not have managed. This trip yielded many such little triumphs.
The answer to the question: "did I miss my SLR?" has to be "no."
Subjects certainly seem more comfortable and relaxed when confronted by the inocuous little GR1. Normally camera-shy people scarcely take any notice of it. It is certainly less intimidating than a big, hulking, noisy SLR with a lens like a telescope.
After
three years and three months on its original battery, the CR123A in the
GR10 finally snuffed it. After replacing it we forgot to reset the date
and time - the clock runs off the main battery. The result is a pack of
pictures with dates out by about 5 years.
But what a place to camp!
URL:
http://www.gr1.artsociety.net/