Earlier this year we managed to get away as a family for a few days to Barcelona. Unsurprisingly it’s a great city for photography, so some cameras inevitably came along. In fact, I even bought one on a slight whim before the trip.
The cameras
The first camera that I took was the X-Pro2, along with the XF 35/2 and XF 23/2 (I’m pretty sure I also took another lens, but whatever it was, I didn’t use it). I also—after some deliberation between this and the GR Digital IV—took the XF10 as my 28mm-equivalent hip shooter. Then, the new one: the Ricoh GR IIIx. I’ve been using GRs for 25 years, but of course this was my first time using one with anything other than a 28mm equivalent focal length, and I was curious.
I’ve split the photos below by camera, because… well, why not?
The XF10
Considering I’ve used GRs fairly constantly since 1998, the XF10 is arguably an odd choice. It lacks a lot of useful features of the GRs, as well as a lot of useful features of other “X” cameras, and is frankly a confused product—but one compelling factor led me to buy it and one other led me to keep it. Respectively, those are: the fact that I bought it new for £250, and the fact that its image quality is quite excellent.
The X-Pro2
The X-Pro2 is my favourite street camera. There is a sense of fluidity to shooting with it: everything falls to hand easily, and it feels like a camera that is friendly to both sides of the lens, which lends a certain confidence to using it on the streets.
The stealthy pocket cameras are very good at what they do, but after using them it feels like coming home whenever I bring the X-Pro to my face.
The GR IIIx
So… the new kid on the block.
I had a slightly bumpy start with the GR IIIx, which wasn’t entirely unexpected. Cameras without viewfinders—and the GR series perhaps more than any other—practically beg to be shot “from the hip”: aimed and shot without eyeballing the scene from the camera’s point of view. There’s a need to practise this: over time you become accustomed to a camera’s field of view, the distance you habitually use for fixed-focus, and so on; but there is always a degree of imprecision, which is why the relatively wide 28mm equivalent works well with this kind of camera.
To do the same with a rather narrower field of view is more challenging, and I’d also made the mistake of thinking that I’d be better off using a further snap focus distance (3.5m, rather than the 2.5m I’d normally use with a GR) to compensate. But in reality I’d have been better off sticking to the same focal distance and just acclimatising to the tighter framing. I had quite a few badly focused shots as a result. (Since then I’ve adapted a bit, using autofocus a lot more and gradually improving my aim—though 28mm does still feel much more natural.)
Used with a slightly less carefree approach, however, the IIIx is an impressive tool. The lens is incredibly sharp, and you have the option of using it in a characterful uncorrected state (with some distortion and vignetting) or correcting raws with the lens profile in Lightroom for a more clinical rendering. Oddly, the camera’s JPEG engine can correct for the vignetting but not the distortion.
It is a unique proposition, however: a large-sensor camera that truly fits in a pocket and has a lens which is more portrait-friendly than the normal 28mm wide angle. As a result, it was the camera I took out every night for dinner with the family, and the one with which I took all of our family shots.
Epilogue
In many ways the trip was photographically frustrating: it’s hard to do good street work when you have three family members in tow. You can’t blend in, you can’t patiently frame-and-wait, and you don’t really get the time to carve out some mental space and slow down and let images form in your head. As a result it can be disappointing coming away from such trips feeling a little like you missed an opportunity.
Nonetheless, it was a useful experience photographically, using focal lengths a little longer than usual. I’m still getting used to the GR IIIx, but it’s also still the camera I’m most likely to take with me whenever I’m not specifically going out shooting.