Waiting

GXR A12-M, f4.0, 1/2, ISO 400, RAW, 42mm (Ricoh GR f2.8 28mm L)

Today, I met fellow bloggers and photographers Iesha and Tom for a mini Ricoh meetup. It is always great to meet other photographers and especially Ricoh users since it quickly becomes clear why we are all using Ricoh cameras, no other camera offers the same handling and image quality in a compact package.

3rd Ricohforum Meetup

After the 3rd Ricoh meetup has been postponed we have rescheduled it for today.

Unfortunately Pavel could not make it for this meetup but this time we had both Tohru from Ricoh and Frazer from Alpha Digital attending. It has been great to see both again, especially together at a meet up.


The Bridge Lounge was as usual a great venue to meetup since despite the central location it is a very quiet and relaxed place in the moning to simply have some coffee and chat about cameras and photography.


It is always great to meet new people with the same interests, this time it was mostly GRD III and GRD II users attending. People enjoyed themselves and could share tips about the GRDs but also try the GXR system with all threee modules available for it.
Unfortunately only a few of the people who signed up for the meetup actually came, this is a shame and not so good considering both Tohru and Frazer had to travel in to London for this meetup.



For the last meetup we had a walk scheduled with stops along the way but this time I decided to see what people were up to and only had a final location planned with the Wapping Hydraulic Power Station. We took the long way there and went over Borough Market and the Tate Modern and back to Tower Bridge before heading towards Wapping.

500th Post :-)

CX1, f3.3, 1/32, ISO 1600, JPG, 28mm

Today, I reached my 500th post on my blog. I would not have thought I will get to 500 posts and certainly not by posting every day.

It was great so far and since starting the blog a lot has happened. I met some great people and fellow bloggers (see blogroll), have met some great people from Ricoh at Photokina 2008 and other occasions, had a factory tour kindly arranged by Ricoh and organized not one but two unofficial and one official Ricoh meet-ups in London and another one is coming up in just two days, I even started to write my own reviews about Ricoh cameras and accessories.

I really enjoy posting here and the comments I have recieved from people, both on the blog and via email, are what keep me going so thanks to all of you.

Everything started with the Ricoh GRD, that I carried around every day and just needed a reason to make use of it every day. This blog provides me with a very good reason to keep taking pictures and post here every day.

Meeting Ricoh HK

On my first day in Hong Kong I got the chance to meet up with the local Ricoh representatives, one of whom I've met at Photokina. It was a great opportunity to meet up again and we arranged another meeting. This time it would be for a full day.
This meeting was today and it is fantastic to see them again. Let me say a big thank you to everyone involved for meeting me and for arranging everything. Today's meeting was not only with Ricoh but also with their main distributor 'Laikok' and the people from 'DC Fever'.
We had lunch together and also discussed the recent price drop for the Ricoh cameras, discussed here by Nevin. The discounts are because of the current economic situation and not because of a new release. The earliest for a new camera release or announcement will be in 2-3 months but rather later.


A big thank you to the guys from DC Fever for getting the red Artisan&Artist* neck straps for me in such a short time. They have some very unique accessories that are difficult to find elsewhere so be sure to check out one of their shops when in HK looking for cameras or gear.


Afterwards we went to the HK Exhibition & Convention Centre to see the 'Inno Design Tech Expo 2008'. Ricoh are present there for having won the 'Good Design Gold Award 2008' for the Ricoh GRD II. If you ask me, this is well deserved since the GRD is the best designed digital camera available with perfect ergonomics.

This is what the jury had to say:

"In the digital camera market, where new products appear in rapid section, this series has always aimed for long-lived design with the high-end amateur users in mind. Ricoh doesn't want its cameras to become mere commodities. I appreciate Ricoh's effort to lengthen the life of their products from an industrial designing standpoint."

The Ricoh cameras at the stand were very popular, especially with girls. Something to the contrary that girls want pink 'soap box' cameras as Canon thinks. This comes as no surprise since women make a big part of buyers for Ricoh cameras, especially in Taiwan.


There is another very interesting meeting with Ricoh scheduled in the next days so check back :).