Why I Bought the Ricoh GRiii | Three Months On

Scroll down past all the words to see the full photoset: 3 Months with the Ricoh GRiii

Film vs. digital: a real life story

Over the last ten years or so, I’ve gotten into the habit of visiting NYC in early October (pandemics notwithstanding), and it’s one of my favorite places to shoot photos in the streets.

During my 2022 NYC trip, I carried two cameras with me everywhere I went for six days — a digital Fuji X-Pro3, and a compact Rollei 35S point-and-shoot film camera. But the experience of juggling film and digital didn’t result in the best of outcomes.

When I’m in New York, I walk almost everywhere so I can shoot as much as possible, taking my time, slowing down and periodically posting up in spots that have good light and lots of action. You know, “street photography.”

On this trip, I switched between cameras as often as it occurred to me, at the time it felt like an even spilt between the two. I came back with over 800 digital photos and approximately 150 film photos, and the amount of “keepers” wasn’t what I’d wanted out of it all (and I try to maintain pretty low expectations and high standards when it comes the keeper ratio).

Editing that batch of NYC photos made it painfully clear to me that shooting digital and shooting film are two different disciplines, and trying to do both at the same time generally means that I’m not focused on the essence of the pursuit — the photography fundamentals required for consistent results, especially in shooting film.

For me, working with a digital camera encourages volume — just shoot as much as I can and sort it all out in Lightroom later. The only limits on the amount of photos I can take are how engaged my vision is, how much ground I’m willing to cover, and the size of the memory cards in the camera.

I try to not let the camera do too much of the work, but my photographic mindset is looser with a digital camera in-hand. I can think all I want about taking the time to line up shots, and adjust as many settings to manual as I can handle, but once I’m out in the streets and I can take as many shots as I want in order to get just the right one out of almost any situation, that’s exactly what I’ll do.

And that’s fine. I love the seemingly endless run-and-gun approach of shooting digital, and the X-Pro3 is an excellent camera — my favorite digital rangefinder style — both in terms of user experience and quality of output.

But with an all-manual mechanical film camera, there’s a finite number of shots in a roll, and every setting needs to be actively considered, so a volume shooting strategy isn’t really an option. I need to lay in wait, or move with purpose and attention, take the time to line up each shot (not just think about it), and hope that I captured the moment I saw with my mind’s eye. Because there’s a fraction of a second between pressing the shutter button and the camera capturing the image, and things really can change in that fraction of a second.

The practice of intuitively seeing the apex of movement, light and composition is the zen of photography, in the streets or anywhere else. The whole process is about slowing down, about evaluating scenes and seeing the shots as they emerge — sensing how the composition is going to come together and capturing it at just the right time, when everything in motion is also in balance.

Attention to those fundamentals is what I found in the dichotomy between digital and film photography, so I decided that’s what I wanted to focus on.

A year of shooting film

As 2022 was winding down, I found myself in Tokyo for two weeks, and largely on my own for about half that time. I overpacked for that trip. I took the Fuji XPro-3 and a couple of prime lenses, the Rollei 35S, and a Leica MP — the all manual, 35mm film camera that I had just picked up — along with a couple dozen rolls of film (an even split of black & white and color).

Neither the Fuji nor the Rollei made it out during that trip to Tokyo, they stayed stashed in my backpack in the hotel room closet. I shot 22 rolls over two weeks with the Leica. And I like the results of my Tokyo endeavors far more than those from the NYC ’22 trip. Not just because the Leica is an incredible camera that’s a joy to shoot with, but because I was more focused on the fundamentals of making photographs — being more purposeful, not rapid-firing the shutter at everything that caught my eye, but making an earnest attempt to use light, motion and composition to capture the scenes I saw unfolding.

Starting then, in December of 2022, I only shot film for 12 months — with the Leica when it made sense, and with Rollei the rest of the time. I never left home without the Rollei, unless I had the Leica with me. It was fun, challenging, and more immersive than shooting digital (especially when I started developing black & white film at home). It made me feel more connected to the process and the output than working with digital images, and I think it made me a better photographer…maybe.

Ricoh GRiii, a return to digital

When I returned to NYC in October ’23, I had both the Leica and the Rollei with me. No digital cameras. But shooting on-the-go, especially at night or indoors in tricky lighting like museums and galleries and bars and restaurants, and taking snapshots while I was hanging out with my wife and friends (living in the moment as opposed to living through the lens), I realized that I wanted a digital backup, something low profile and pocketable but powerful.

After a couple weeks of internet research, I decided the Ricoh GRiii was my best option. When it comes to digital cameras I’m big fan of Fuji, but Fuji doesn’t make anything quite like the GRiii. Its 28mm equivalent lens is a workable focal length for just about any situation, it’s palm-sized and easily pocketable, super quiet, and not at all flashy looking, but it boasts the tech specs to take decent images.

It’s got a lot of fancy settings that allow for the creation of “recipes” (settings combinations that result in film emulation and other treatments) for both black & white and color, but I haven’t explored those too much. I’ve been far less interested in what the camera can do, and more into exploring what I can do with the camera. So I shoot RAW images and convert, process, and edit as needed in Lightroom.

I started using the Ricoh GRiii in December of 2023, and I’ve been pleased with the results so far. It’s in my pocket about as often as the Rollei 35 — which is to say, I’ve always got one of them on me. Unless I’m out with the Leica, in which case I’ve probably also got the Ricoh in my bag or in my pocket.

This photoset contains photos made with the GRiii, in chronological order, while getting acquainted with it between December ’23 and February ’24. You can see my intent manifested here — mostly snapshot style photos, quick, candid, mundane, everyday life, and street shots, all pretty casually captured as I went about my days and nights…

Closing Out 2022: I’m Still Taking Pictures

What Was I Even Doing in 2022?

As I look ahead to next year and plot some high-level goals & aspirations, I’ve been looking back over the last year of photographic output. While I can’t help thinking about how, why and when I pursue creative endeavors, and what my personal relationship is with it all, I ultimately tend to get frustrated with all that creative metacognition and go back to focusing on just doing the damn thing.

And when it comes down to doin the damn thing, I didn’t shoot enough this past year.

In any case, the images contained in the galleries sprinkled throughout this post represent my favorite film photos from 2022, taken with a variety of 35mm and medium format cameras. Give ‘em a click to expand.

What’s in Store for 2023?

Keeping it simple for 2023, there are just two things (I think) I want to focus on when it comes to photography:

1. Shoot more. And shoot more film…maybe exclusively shoot film? I guess I shot quite a bit of film in 2021 too, but some of my more notable photo excursions were shot with a digital camera. And to be clear, I really like my digital camera rig and I really enjoy shooting with it. And I’m not a film snob. But I regularly consider limiting my options as a means of up-leveling fundamental skills and digging deeper into creativity.

This idea of focusing more (if not exclusively) on film started in October, after a trip to NYC in which most of my film photos turned out like shit — I think because I split my focus on shooting digital and film simultaneously, and in the aftermath I really came face to face with the realization that I don’t approach them in the same way.

Fresh off that realization, I went to Tokyo in December and, while I took my core digital rig with me (a Fuji setup that, again, I like very much), I didn’t snap a single digital photo. I opted instead to use the Leica MP 35mm film camera exclusively as I explored that city. And while, as of this writing, the results are still TBD (the lab is closed until the new year), the experience was exhilarating, and also a little challenging in that it was entirely without any of the luxuries that digital or more feature-rich film cameras offer. The MP is all mechanical and all manual — it only requires a battery for the light meter, and the camera works fine if the battery dies, you just need to find an alternate way to meter — so it forced to me slow down and get used to having to manage every aspect of the process while on the move.  I came away from the experience with the unwavering feeling that I need a lot more of that.

2. Make more physical media — prints, booklets, foldy zines, whatever else I can come up with that’s equal parts a little polished, but still DIY, and not crazy expensive.

Sharing photos online is the quickest and easies way to connect with photo communities, especially in engaging and supportive environments like Glass, Mastodon and Flickr. But posting digital photography on the internet, even in places where genuine interest thankfully takes the place of algorithmic imperative, can feel a little like stuffing content into a void.

Exploring the impact of physical media, of sharing the tangible results of my photographic endeavors, is increasingly appealing to me these days. The reach won’t be nearly as broad as it can be in a global digital environment where finding new things is as easy as clicking on a hashtag, but I don’t care about that — I want to share work with people in formats that are tactile and interactive, held rather than scrolled through, can be passed on, left out on coffee tables or bookshelves or the tops of toilet tanks, and can be easily revisited.

Physical media just seems like a more worthwhile endeavor than posting for the fleeting engagement of likes, boosts and comments. Not that I’ll stop posting photos to the internet…

All that said, I’ve had 5”x7” prints of the photos for my next booklet project on the wall in my home office for literally months without any movement, so a bias toward action on the production side of things is definitely needed.

I think what it comes down to is that, more than any other kind of photographer, I’m an opportunistic photographer — I almost always have a camera on me — and unless I’m traveling, I rarely set out with the specific intent to shoot. That needs to change.

I need to make the time and put in the effort to approach photography with purpose: take pictures because I set out to take pictures, make things with the pictures because that’s how I want the work to be represented.

I’ll figure out what it all means later.

Adventures in Landscape Photography: Shooting Point Lobos

I don’t go around calling myself a street photographer (or any kind of photographer, really), but for the most part I’ve generally focused my photographic efforts on streets or urban spaces, and the people, objects, architecture — whatever else captures my attention — within them. But my earliest exposure to photography was the nature focused work of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston.

I grew up on the Central Coast of California, south of San Francisco, where the names Adams and Weston are as synonymous with photography as Steinbeck is with literature. My dad, being a seasoned photographer himself, was always a fan of the local masters and that’s what I was raised to see as the gold standard of the medium. I’m certainly a fan of Adams and Weston, but I’ve never been interested in emulating either of these two pioneers, and nature is not a subject that I’ve explored a whole lot in my own pursuits.

But back in July, when the decision was made to take a quick road trip from Oakland down the coast for a midweek escape from the apartment (after almost 5 months of laying real low), I revisited the old copy of Weston’s My Camera At Point Lobos that my dad gifted me, and felt somewhat motivated to have a morning hike around Point Lobos, just south of Carmel, to make some photos. It’s a nice place for a light hike, photographer or not.

Maybe it’s the Central California coastal climate that keeps the Point Lobos State Natural Preserve in what feels like constant, concurrent cycles of decay and rejuvenation. It’s two seasons at once, all the time: fall and spring. The bright greens of lush growth are always accompanied by the paler greens, bright reds, oranges and yellows of degeneration as the forest eats itself, the older growth becoming mulch for what’s coming up next.

I shot that morning with the FujiFulm X-Pro 3 and 18mm f/2 lens for a wider view. It was the inaugural run of the X-Pro 3, which I had just picked up and expected to prove in the streets rather than the forest. But I’m not one to stand on ceremony, and either setting is potentially as fruitful as the other.

I also shot with the Minolta XG-M, loaded with Cinestill 800T 35mm, and a 50mm f/1.7 for a tighter view. The Cinestill is, admittedly, an odd film choice for this type of outing. A tungsten film, it seems to prefer bright artificial lights, especially reds and blues, in high contrast situations — think: urban nighttime photography. But I wondered if it might react interestingly to the gray skies, light spikes through the forest canopy, and the colors & texture of the Point Lobos landscape. The outcome wasn’t exactly what I expected, but I’m not mad at it either.

Here’s a gallery of both film and digital snaps from a morning hike around Point Lobos in late July 2020…

Edward Weston Early Works at Monterey Art

I snapped this photo with my iPhone, and it doesn't do a shred of justice to the real things.

I snapped this photo with my iPhone, and it doesn't do a shred of justice to the real things.

I was in Monterey, CA last weekend and took some time to hit up the Monterey Museum of Art to see this show — Edward Weston: Portrait of the Young Man as an Artist.

As an amateur photographer, a fan of Weston’s work, and a native of California’s Central Coast, I am well aware of Weston’s landscape photography from that region — some of my favorite Weston photographs were made at Point Lobos, where I spent a lot of time as a young man — and this show contains a good sampling of that work and the later era that produced it (between the late 1930s and mid ‘40s).

However, this show focuses largely on Weston's earlier work, photos he made in the early 1900s through early ‘30s, much of which I’m not very familiar with, which is why I was so excited to see it.

This period was obviously highly developmental, revealing the beginnings of themes and techniques that Weston pursued throughout his career, showcasing some of his earliest landscape and structure studies, but more notably his approach to using singular subjects as studies of light and form — objects like bell peppers and nautilus shells, as well as nude figures. What struck me with a lot of these photos is the way he was able to convey the similarity with which he viewed and captured these subjects, and the museum did a particularly good job of showcasing that relationship.

This show is up though April 10, and it's well worth a day trip from the Bay Area to Monterey to check out.