I’ve been a long-time fan of the Ricoh GR series of cameras. This dates back to the late 90s, when I went into a shop in Central London looking for a replacement for my Minox GT, and was convinced by the salesman to try the then-new GR1 instead. Well, I was convinced, and duly took it on a tour of Venezuela, where it was scandalously mistreated (including being dropped in a river) and yet worked just fine. It also opened my eyes to the difference that a high quality lens could make, and was a major contribution to me taken photography a bit more seriously. A few years later it was joined by a GR1v and the two of them went to India with me. Eventually I gave away the GR1. I still have the GR1s, but it is fairly infirm. Ricoh introduced a digital take on the GR - logically enough, the GR Digital, or GRD, around 2004. I passed on this, but bought the follow-up GRD 2. Unfortunately, despite their very high build quality, in my experience Ricoh GRs, both film and digital, have never been all that reliable, and the GRD 2 carried on the tradition with the lens extension mechanism getting very unreliable when it was just out of warranty. Eventually I gave up on it, and bought the latest version, the GRD 4, which had a better sensor, faster lens, superb screen and sensor stabilisation.  It worked, until, largely due to brain fade on my part, it got stolen in Buenos Aires back in January. I doubt it found much interest from the fences. I was in a mind to replace it, but I couldn’t find one at a good price in this part of the world, and then the tempting Nikon Coolpix A came along.

But before I could succumb to temptation, I came across an Olympus XA for sale in a local market.

This, it turns out, was a stroke of luck in more than one way, because as well as reconnecting me with the joys of the XA series, it also saved me from spending a lot of money on a Nikon which I can now save for the imminent new Ricoh GR. While there had been some wishful thinking on various fora that a GRD 5 might turn up sometime, maybe towards the end of the year, the sudden appearance of a model that looks like it trumps the Coolpix A in every department, apparently for a lower price, is quite a surprise.

I also questioned if I really like shooting with a 28mm field of view, or if in fact I just like the fact that the GRs are wonderfully engineered and fit in my pocket.  After all, conventional internet wisdom decides that 28mm is for “street”, whatever the hell that is, or “landscape”. Well, I don’t really do street, and the only people who think that landscape exclusively means wide angle either don’t do landscape or make very boring photos. So, just to reassure myself, I had a go at resuscitating the GRD 2, and this has been partially successful. And I found a cheap secondhand Lumix 14mm (28mm equivalent) to put on the front of my Olympus PEN, for good measure. And I decided that yes, I do like 28mm, which really should not have come as a surprise.

So, in anticipation of a new Ricoh GR, here are some recent shots, all taken during lunchtime walks in the last week or so, with an old, battered and recalcitrant GRD 2. Hey, it still seems to work.

Just a short walk today. But time enough to revisit a potentially photographically rich location, hidden away at the back of the village of Giubiasco. This is where my current favourite pipe ends up, feeding the old power station by the river. I believe it contributes something like 0.0002% of local electricity needs. Still, it’s a very clean 0.0002%.

beneath (the grid). Ricoh GRD IV, processed in FilterStorm Pro

See the alternative edit in Aperture

On a well known photography gear forum, which I imagine I’m not the only one to far too regularly seek out as a displacement activity, yesterday I came across a question asking “is the Ricoh GRD any good for anything other than grainy black and white ?”. It’s a valid question - the vast majority of GR photos you find on the web are indeed black, white, grainy and often gritty. Auteur street photography dominates. And yet as far as I recall, I’ve only ever published low ISO colour stuff. Probably another reason why my genius is chronically ignored and overlooked.

So I thought I’d give it a spin. Using a “recipe” suggested by another contributer to the same forum, I made a settings set with ISO 1600 (gasp!), hi-contrast black & white, with a pinch of classic square format to taste.

The first three photos here are taken at the “Ala Pelera” watchtower above Camorino, part of the Fortini della Fame built in the early 19th Century in reaction to political instability in Lombardy, as well as famine in Ticino.

Ala Pelera detail 1. Ricoh GRD IV

Ala Pelera detail 2. Ricoh GRD IV

Ala Pelera detail 3. Ricoh GRD IV

The next two were taken in the woods a little way from the watchtower, same general area as my previous post.

Tracked. Ricoh GRD IV

Pipeline. Ricoh GRD IV

So, there we go. I’ve now joined the Ricoh GRD grainy black & white club. Lavish praise cannot fail to follow.

Resizing and framing done in Filterstorm Pro on the iPad. Otherwise straight from camera. Filterstorm is a pretty amazing application, but it’s fairly complicated, and I’m not sure if I’ve got the workflow properly sorted out yet. The uploads seem to be very compressed.

There’s some pretty remarkable stuff hidden away in the steep woods that rise to the East of Giubiasco. Today, while searching for feeder pipe which comes down from a dam much higher up, to the small hydro power station at the foot of the Morobbia valley, I found the remnants of a seemingly long disused funicular railway. Maybe it was used during the construction of the pipe, some 100 years ago. Who knows. It’s not telling, and very few people seem to care about their history.

Feeder Pipe. Ricoh GRD4, via Filterstorm Pro

Ghost. Ricoh GRD4, via Filterstorm Pro

And later, following a new-looking sign, I discovered a really overgrown, long disused trackway leading back down to the old village - and the truly horrendous hodgepodge of unimaginative, sterile concrete bunker architecture which I’m sorry to say only the Swiss could love.

Well, one of my other cameras is a Ricoh. Actually 3 of them are…

I’ve written quite a lot of stuff here about the Olympus E-System cameras I use, but I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned my long-standing relationship with Ricoh. Since I’ve been using my Ricoh GR film and digital cameras for something close to 15 years, I thought it was time to redress the situation.

I first encountered Ricoh cameras back in 1998 when I was looking for a replacement for my broken-down Minox 35GT to take on a trip to Venezuela. The shop I went to, a Minox / Leica specialist, recommended I look at the new Ricoh GR-1 instead. The GR was a beautifully built camera, in a magnesium shell, with a fixed focal f2.8 28mm lens, and full manual control. I bought it on the spot, and never regretted it. In fact in marked a turning point for me in photography, as it really opened my eyes to what difference a quality lens can make. And the Ricoh GR lens was up with the best - so much that it was recast as a limited edition and very sought after Leica SM-mount lens.

The GR-1S doing what’s it better than me at: street photography

If the GR-1 had a downside it was, at least for me, reliability. My GR-1’s autofocus module broke and had to be replaced out of warranty. It wasn’t cheap. I later added a GR-1S as a backup: the main difference between the 1 and 1S was a threaded lens ring to which filters and a lens hood could be added. Again, I got great results from it, but again it failed, this time the film transport giving up. Ricoh also released a GR-1V, which had a sort of manual focus option and, at last, manual ISO setting. Later they also released the GR-21, with the same body but a fabulous 21mm GR lens. Unfortunately the price of the GR-21 was stratospheric, and it arrived too late on the market to hold its own against the digital tide.

Roll on several years, and Ricoh finally responded to calls from the GR user community and released a digital version, the GR Digital, or “GRD”. The GRD carried on the GR philosophy, in a similar but slightly smaller body, but with an 8Mpx digital sensor, and, unfortunately, no optical viewfinder. The GR lens was reborn as a 28mm equivalent, f2.4. The optical viewfinder issue was sort of solved with a rather expensive external viewfinder, but since this displays no shooting information, it is a bit of a compromise. The biggest problem with the GRD was the excessive time between captures, at least when recording RAW (and honestly, I can’t really understand why anybody in the market for such a specialist camera would be shooting exclusively JPEG).

A year or so later the GR Digital 2 solved several of these issues, and also came in a “creative kit” with a 21mm adapter and a new, smaller optical viewfinder. The pixel count increased to 10Mpx. After some hesitation between this and the equally attractive, but different, Ricoh GX-200, I decided it was time to take the plunge. The GRD2 has been with me for a while now. It’s as much a pleasure to use as it’s film ancestor, and Ricoh have carried across their unparalleled attention to the user experience to the digital domain. The camera has probably the best menu system on the market, across all classes, and beautifully designed features like the adjust lever and other manual controls, and the high level of customisation make it apparent that this camera was designed by people who take photographs and understand photographers. Added to this Ricoh was one of the few manufacturers to adopt the DNG format for Raw files, making software incompatibilities largely vanish.

A sort of thematically linked shot from the GRD2

If the GRD2 has one downside, it is, once again, reliability. Maybe I’m unlucky, or maybe I’m careless, but for some reason my GRD2 has become quite reluctant to start up. On power up, the lens extends, and the camera is ready to go. Except when it isn’t. Mine starts up, extends then lens, and then quite often hunts a bit, and then gives up. It can take several attempts to coax it into life, by which time the opportunity is usually miles away.

The GRD2 also has an excellent macro mode, allowing focussing down to 1cm, really taking advantage of the fantastic lens.

A macro shot from the GRD2

Many people use the GRDs for black & white work. There’s a whole Flickr gallery devoted to this, and probably others. Apparently the GRD1 was particularly good for this, the later models slightly less so. Anyway the GRD2 has worked for me.

Somewhere in California: a black & white conversion from the GRD2

It’s also an interesting infrared camera, just about hand-holdable at ISO200 in strong sunlight.

Somewhere on an island: an infrared capture, b&w conversion from the GRD2

The GRD3 came along some time later, with an improved f1.9 lens, an improved, but still, thankfully, a 10Mpx sensor, Ricoh being one of the first companies to opt out of the pointless and counterproductive megapixel war. However, there wasn’t really enough here for me to be tempted to upgrade. A nice thing about all these upgrades is that Ricoh kept them very anonymous. All 3 versions simply have “GR Digital” written on the front, and “Ricoh” on the back. Nothing else. Only a GRD owner could tell them apart, and even then not without a careful look. Ricoh certainly are not making their customers pay to buy a mobile advertising banner, unlike the vast majority of other camera manufacturers.

Ricoh’s introduction of the totally bonkers GXR system, looking a lot like a GRD on steroids, only with interchangeable lens/sensor modules, made many fear that the GRD, and the GX for that matter, had reached the end of the road. GX + GR = GXR. However, a GRD4 has in fact recently seen the light, and in carries on in the tradition of it’s predecessors in looking pretty much exactly the same, and carrying just the label “GR digital”. The new stuff this time around is pretty interesting: stabilisation, new hybrid autofocus, a new state of the art LCD, even better menu system and even more customisation. These, combined with the GRD3’s updates, makes the GRD4 seem a worthy update over the GRD2, even if unfortunately due to the different lens housing the GRD2’s 21mm and lens hood adaptors don’t fit.

Up close: a macro shot from the GRD4

Ricoh cameras, especially the GRs, have that mysterious factor which attracts a devoted following. For some reason there also seems to be high correlation between GR fans and Olympus owners - I don’t know why, it’s just an observation. There’s a Ricoh forum, which is largely dedicated to the GR, although the GX and GXR get a share of activity. There’s plenty of GR goodness on Wouter Brandsma’s blog. Sean Reid’s review at Reid Reviews (subscription required, but well worth it) starts off with the thought “why doesn’t every serious photography have this camera ?”.

Indeed… well, provided you enjoy a 28mm field of view!