Thursday 1 October 2009

Riding Together

RD1s, f5.6, 1/2000, ISO 400, JPG b&w

Another picture from the RD1, this time I made sure I focused beter and have also used the out of camera JPG.
The Epson RD1 is a great camera but it attracts a lot of attention from people, like all rangefinders do these days. I am also not too big a fan of the whole manual focus experience and rather use a good, fast and reliable AF system. I am also not a big fan of the 2:3 format and prefer the 4:3 format or 16:9, if I want something wider.
The experience however is great and the manual controls are as they shoud be with a proper manual focus on the lens and not the rubbish dSLR lenses with the video camera focus ring. I wish a manufacturer would start producing proper dSLR lenses with proper mechanical controls on them.

3 comments:

  1. I really love this one. It's still possible to see all details in the dark areas.

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  2. I used a combination of the R-D1 and GRDII on trips to Buenos Aires, Paris, and Mexico City in the last 18 months, primarily using a 35mm lens on the Epson for my street photography. I generally shot at F8, with the focus preset around 8 feet. I didn't find the rangefinder attracted inordinate interest in those places. Where the Ricoh was irreplaceable for me was in shots in the metros in those cities; especially in Paris, where so many people in the metro were looking at somce kind of screen anyway (cellphones etc), the GRDII was practically invisible.

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  3. Thanks for your comment Robert! The high dynamic range really helps and makes a big difference for this picture.

    Thanks Jack! This is very interesting, I find that especially in London you attract quite a lot of attention using cameras whch stand out from the usual dSLR and cheap p&s crowd. To be fair, the GRDs with the 40mm lens also atract more attention than they do without it.

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