Despite the very rainy New Year’s weekend (Brooklyn, NY), luckily it still has not been too winter-y lately.
I try my best to to bring camera (other than my phone) with me at all times. I used to rock the Panasonic GF-1 for day-to-day snaps, but my most recent addition, the Ricoh GF I, has been making me enjoy the genre of photography that I’ve never really dabbled into — street photography. (I am still warming up into it, so photos will still be sporadic.)
When researching what is the best street/compact camera that was super affordable second-hand, the Ricoh GF (usually the II) is always at the top of street photographers’ list. I saw a decent deal on Craigslist so I copped it and it has not left my winter coat pocket ever since.
I picked version 1 of the the Ricoh GF because that’s all I could afford at the moment and from what I gathered, the only main difference from the the GF II aside from the standard second-generation improvements, was the wi-fi capabilities. Since I had a wi-fi enabled memory card, I could do without it.
I love the compactness of the camera (easily fits a jacket pocket and can be operated mostly with just one hand) and the ability to customize almost all the buttons. I set mine to have no sound at all and even turned off the AF-assist light so when I do shoot in the streets/crowd, the snap can be very discreet.
A very important feature of the camera is also setting the snap focus distance. I’ll dive deeper into that next time, but the ability to do a quick full press of the shutter and it captures a pre-set focus distance immediately, used properly, can is killer on the streets.
The featured photos on this post was from a walk around the block near my apartment. All JPEG and straight out of the camera. Pretty clear and blue for a the first day of January.