I got a Ricoh GR Monochrome
I learned to shoot on film, mostly black & white, and did my own development and printing. Yes, I sat in the darkest, windowless corner of my basement at night to unwrap canisters and load reels, even bulk load film. Yes, I had a multi-contrast filter pack for my enlarger. I did multiple exposures in the darkroom. I dodged with little paper shapes on sticks and burned by making shapes with my hands. Yes, I really am a millennial!
No, I did not have a lot of friends in high school 😂
Photography, for me, will always be tied back to those early days. I can still smell the chemistry. It smells like nostalgia.
So obviously as soon as I learned that monochrome digital cameras existed, I wanted one!
But the Leica is far, far too rich for my blood, and even I couldn't see myself spending the $1500+ to get a camera body converted by MaxMax etc. any time soon.
Then @james-warner-b came out with his video…
I reached out to MG right away, and he had a Ricoh GR already converted, in stock. The original, 16mp model. Just $800? Including the camera itself? SOLD.
Realtalk: My first few shots sucked.
Shooting pure black & white — no physical or digital color "filters" and adjustments to rely on — is a skill, and I was very rusty. And the desert is often a place of overwhelming light and not so much shadows.
But the sharpness was there. The challenge was there. I was hooked, even though I had yet to make anything good with it.
I had to remember how to hunt for pure light and shadow. That most landscapes are made of 18% grey.
The margin for editing is, comparatively, razor thin with a true monochrome camera. But the exposure latitude and DR on this camera is just beyond. (Which, ironically, makes the initial files flatter and require more work. But c'est la vie!)
While I'm waiting on a filter adapter so I can get my RGYO on and control the contrast in-camera, I am remembering how to actually process true black and white.
Here's an example… in person, the lighting was quite dramatic, but it did not initially come through on the super-high-DR sensor:
Not my best work, but it's getting there!
I started a Flickr album to show my progress. Also includes some screenshots of difficulties I ran into with the un-demosaiced raw files looking kinda funny, and the solution.
The Ricoh GR takes to monochrome like a duck to water. I love that it's so portable, and so very very sharp… like a poor man's Leica Q2 mono. I love that I can slip it in a pocket and shoot it one-handed. I think some day I'll want a monochrome camera with interchangeable lenses, but I'll never give this one up.
I'm thinking I might try specialty photo editing software that has a lot of features for black & white, like Nik Silverfx or Topaz Studio. (And obviously I bought Monochrome2DNG.)
Monochrome photography is an investment and imo, it's worth it.
Congratulations - and welcome to the digital monochrome world. I think your monochrome photographs are very good.
My investigation how to treat a RAW file from a converted camera so that an(y) image processing software can handle these files as "no need to demosaic, because there is no CFA pattern" is still in progress.
Have much fun with your GR!
E.
