My introduction to the Ricoh GR series

In August 2018, I bought my first Ricoh GR camera; specifically, the film GR1s. There were not a lot available on the European Ebay so I had to get one from Japan for 519 USD. Here was also my first experience with importation tax, a truly despicable concept to us Europeans who are accustomed to the EU’s Single Market.

But I digress, I took the Ricoh GR1s with me to Korea for an exchange semester that fall and I have used it to document large portions of my stay with it. Having something small in your pocket that you can whip out whenever there is an opportunity (don’t say it…) and get decent to good image quality with it is indispensable to us photographers. To answer the question, why didn’t I do it with my phone to document my time in Korea, it’s because I had the Samsung J5 (2017). An okay phone, but the camera was horrendous on it (certainly when compared to the potential of 35mm film).

Having the ability to take a good image at all times makes you more attentive and seek out new opportunities than you would otherwise. Even mundane images can become interesting over time. Take this image of a bus for example, it’s not particularly interesting, but it holds sentimental value to me because I had to take that bus whenever I left my apartment. Looking back at it now, I would have likely taken more images of it during the shift of seasons and times of the day, and made a series from it.

The main concern I had with the camera was that it had a fixed 28mm lens. I’m a portrait photographer so I’ve virtually never shot that wide at the time. My comfort focal length was 50mm. But that was fine because I ended up using it to take photos of groups of friends and even when taking pictures of individuals, the wide perspective is what most non-photographers are used to from their phones anyways. Additionally, having a camera on me at all times has soon made me known as the photographer guy among the other students which made it easier for me to meet new people and connect with them.

The GR1s also had a feature no other phone had: a built-in flash. If you tried to take a photo in a club with your phone, it would turn on the flashlight to illuminate the scene and within seconds a security guard would walk up to you. But among all the strobe lights in the clubs, no one will notice a flash from a pocketable camera and you can use it to create fun images with your friends and share when you get the roll developed. But please, use discretion and sound judgment. There’s a reason why a guard would walk up to you if they knew.

There were only a few times when I was disappointed with the images I got out of it, but to be fair they were due to user error. Once when I began to learn about pushing and pulling, I tried pushing a roll of Pro Image 100 by two stops (I don’t know why either..). I’ve set it up correctly on the camera, but forgot to tell the lab about it. As you can imagine all images from that trip were overexposed by two stops which caused burned highlights. I ended up not sharing these images with my friends with whom I was there that say out of shame.. In retrospect they look fine on their own, but when compared to even my friends small MFT Olympus back then they were unusable.