In Between

GRD III, f3.5, 1/320, ISO 64, RAW, 8.4mm

I recently received an email about my review of the Raynox QC-303 adapter and how it works on the GRD III. This prompted me to try it out, it has been a while since I last used it and I never used it on the GRD III.
Still, I wanted to also try something slightly different and thought of using the text mode with this but it was not really that interesting. This picture in b&w is closer to what I had in mind.

Sad Lovers

GRD II, f2.8, 1/35, ISO 80, RAW, 8.4mm

The last day of my fish-eye lens week is today. I took a few pictures on my way home but this worked best due to the perspective although I had to play around with the colors and saturation a bit to get the look I wanted.
It was a fun week and taking pictures where the quality does not matter and you can get away with noisy or blurry pictures is definitely something different to what most people try to achieve. While it will be back to normal from tomorrow, I am already thinking about the next weekly theme, maybe a text mode week would be fun.

The Passageway

GRD II, f2.4, 1/6, ISO 80, RAW, 8.4mm

The City of London is full of small passageways or alleyways like this, it makes it easy to go between the main roads and provides lots of shortcuts. It also has a lot of "hidden" pubs, bars and shops in some of the narrow alleys. If you are in the City, make sure you look out for them and find out where they lead you. If nothing else you may find an interesting photo opportunity.

Tortoise

GRD II, f5.6, 1/70, ISO 80, RAW, 8.4mm

This is another picture from Greenwich Park but with the nice weather at the moment it is too nice not to go here on my way home. This is another "wildlife" picture and I thought of James after I took it ;).

By the Beach

GRD II, f5.6, 1/800, ISO 80, RAW, 8.4mm

Another lunchtime picture, this time from the city "beach". :)
The weather was great and it would have been really nice to be able to go to a real beach but since it was not posible the beach at the Thames had to do the job.

Boy in the Red Tracksuit

GRD II, f4, 1/100, ISO 80, RAW 1:1, 8.4mm

The weather was great today and since I finished early I took a walk through Greenwich Park. With the sun out I am more motvated and using the fish-eye lens pushes me to try out new things and different perspectives. This picture might not be so different from the usual pictures I have but it was the one I liked most from today.

Curious Squirrel

GRD II, f5.6, 1/400, ISO 80, RAW 1:1, 8.4mm

Following on with my 'Fish-eye Week' was a nice walk through Greenwich Park and along the Thames to the O2. The weather was great and there were a lot of people out and about.
Using the fish-eye lens is great fun and leads me to see thigs in a different light. There a few really cool things you can only do with this lens but when I briefly comapred it with the GR lens it is unbelievable how much quality gets lost by using the adapter lens. Then again, it is not about the quality but about the fun and about seeing things different.

Growing Chimney

GRD II, f6.3, 1/270, ISO 80, RAW, 8.4mm

I haven't used my fish-eye lens for quite a while so I thought it could be fun to have a fish-eye or Lomo-style week. I went out for a stroll around the neighbourhood today. This picture I liked and processed it to get this look.
The GRD II is better for this kind of pictures because it has a distance scale for manual focus and also remembers the focus distance even when powered off.

Curves

GRD, f5, 1/640, ISO 64, JPG, 8.4mm

I finally got my GRD I back from Ricoh after they changed the lens assembly. Really missed the camera. It does feel different using it.
Using the GRD I for the first time with the fish-eye lens showed that although it has the better noise and colors to emulate a Lomo it does not remember the manual focus when turned off and the metering is more affected than on the GRD II.

I liked this scene due to the curves on the road, the car and the lens. I added some noise and increased the contrast even more than I did in-camera. Now it looks more like I had in mind when taking it. While I usually keep the jpgs from the GRD I as they are out of the camera the fish-eye lens pictures work better with some post processing.

Dog Day Afternoon

GRD II, f2.8, 1/100, ISO 80, RAW, 8.4mm

The weather was great, warm and sunny and by finishing work early I had enough time to go to the park in Greenwich and enjoy the sun. While walking around I decided to use the fish-eye lens again.
Dogs are great subjects for fish-eye photography, their long noses and curious nature means you can get some very interesting shots. I left the vignetting at the corners as it was but cropped the image slightly and changed the colors and contrast with the curves tool to give it more of a Lomo feel.

Fish-eye 3 - The Eye of the Fish

Ok, artistically today's pictures won't win any awards or are even worth discussing. I took a short walk and wanted to show the different field of view of the different lenses and the distortion you might expect from them and finish my report on the adapter lenses.
I already discussed the Raynox QC-303 that provides a 8.4mm field of view. On Saturday, I got the Raynox QC-505 that provides a field of view of 14mm and not 16mm as previously mentioned. The QC-505 is slightly smaller but thicker so you have to manually focus at around 4-5cm or use macro as with the QC-303. Overall the distortion is lower with this lens and you get more usable image with it. However I find it less fun to use since the distortion and huge field of view is what makes the QC-303 so much fun :). Overall there is not much to choose between the two lenses since none is suited for any serious photography where technical quality is important. Both however are a lot of fun to use and are suited to get an interesting look.

Fish-eye 2 - The Return

"Jesus"
GRD II, f4.5, 1/320, ISO 200, RAW, 8.4mm

"Sharp"
GRD II, f2.4, 1/40, ISO 200, RAW, 14mm

People are never happy with what they have and always want something else even if they don't need it. Since I am no exception to that I thought I have to try out the Raynox QC-505 adapter, too. So I went today to Tottenham Court Road and after some haggling got the adapter for a good price. While I tried it out shortly last week it was not long enough to really get to know what it can do.
Today I could try it alongside the QC-303 and while the QC-303 gives 8.4mm field of view the QC-505 is closer to 14mm so quite a big difference. On the other side it exhibits a lot less distortion and a more usable picture overall.
I will do a quick comparison tomorrow and show the different field of view plus other things I might find interesting.
For today enjoy these two pictures, one is shot with the 303 and the other with the 505 as you can see from the exif information.

Fish-eye

GRD II, f4.5, 1/250, ISO 80, RAW, 8.4mm

Now, what can someone buy who has every extra from Ricoh for his GRDs? Simple, one goes and buys a lens to make a Lomo Fish-eye camera out of the Ricoh. You take what is one of the best lenses on a camera and make it to one of the worst, sounds simple enough. Sounds silly to do so but it's a lot of fun actually and I can recommend it to the person who has everything but wants more :D.
After reading on Flickr and in the GetDPI forums about the Raynox QC-505 and QC-303 fish-eye lenses for camcorders I decided to buy the QC-303. The QC-505 gives you an equivalent field of view of 16mm but this was not good enough for me and I wanted more, so I got the QC-303 since goes down to 8.4mm :).
Now the lens is pretty well made and a snap on lens for 37mm threads. One thing I noticed that although it is snap on, for better quality make sure you snap it on and then screw it on a little bit. This fixes it better and the quality improves slightly (as far as this is possible). Once it's on you have to use the macro mode to focus but if you want an instant response just use manual focus and set it to 2-3cm so you focus on the lens. This will give you the snap mode and everything will be in focus.
I hear you say this is all nice but what about the image quality. Well, it is as expected very bad and you have distortion, chromatic aberrations in all the colors of the rainbow, some lens flare and the metering of the GRD does not work properly with the lens on. This is without me getting started on the dark corners and vignetting, although there is hardly any vignetting visible to be honest.
You probably wonder why I would recommend this lens although it goes against the optical quality of the GRDs? The answer is simple, if you always wanted to have a digital Lomo this gets you as close as it gets. Or if you just want to have some fun with it, then it's great and worth the money.

The picture on the top is heavily edited so in order to give you a better overview see the picture below for a straight RAW conversion with all the faults left intact ;). Finally the last picture shows the GRD II with the lens on.