Landscapes with a Point-and-Shoot
2024 was a busy year for our family, with a few international trips, some big changes at work, and raising two young children. One of our favorite family vacations we’ve ever taken was in August/September of 2024, to Japan.
Despite my best efforts, when it came time to pack for our two-week long trip, I quickly realized I didn’t have enough space for my full camera kit, even though I’ve written about how to pack light. Between two-weeks worth of diapers, a travel stroller, and packing a whole extra suitcase just to take back all of the goodies we knew we wanted to grab in Japan (so much pottery, clothing, and food), I didn’t have a spare carry-on, much less space in my bags for a tripod.
So, I tried something new. I used some credit card rewards points I had been saving up and purchased myself a Ricoh GR III Street Edition. You won’t find it in many blogs or YouTube channels for landscape photography, and for good reason - it’s a fixed 28mm equivalent which, while wide-ish, isn’t capable of those super wide sweeping shots, and of course is not an interchangeable lens, so no telephoto vignettes. I’ll be honest, when I got it I thought I might just try my hand at some street or streetscape photography in Tokyo, and so I wasn’t even really considering the possibility of being able to enjoy my landscape photography hobby while on the trip.
Seascape photo from a beach on Okinawa
But as you can see above, it was hard to resist. There were some incredible scenes that I had to capture, and I was so glad that I had this amazing little camera on me.
The Camera
The Ricoh GR III Street Edition is just a re-skinned version of the regular GR III (with some extremely minor updates that realistically I will never use), which is itself the next iteration of the extremely popular Ricoh GR II. My older brother has a GR II, and had let me mess around with it, plus I had already seen several of his family photos that he had taken with his camera, so I was already aware of its capabilities.
The GR II and GR III are very popular with street photographers, for a couple reasons:
That 28mm-equivalent focal length on its fixed lens is wide enough to get streetscapes, but not so wide that you can’t get close to a subject if you want to.
The form-factor is absolutely tiny, meaning it’s inconspicuous when shooting from the hip, and easily fits into your pocket. Seriously, it’s only marginally larger than my wallet, and at 9 oz (including the battery), you hardly feel it in your pocket.
There are a lot of usability features that I’m still learning, like snap focus and several customizable shooting modes. For landscapes, these features don’t matter.
There are a lot of popular pre-loaded “filters” when exporting JPEGs from the camera, which Ricoh has put a lot of time into making very artsy and trendy. Photos look great coming out of the camera, but I don’t use these filters since I really enjoy the editing process and prefer to shoot RAW.
Lastly, the optical quality is just incredible. Super sharp, great low-light performance’, able to shoot at f2.8 and output 24mp images. This is all the stuff that matters for landscapes.
So what was it actually like to shoot landscapes on such a tiny little pocket camera, with no zoom, no tripod, no set-up? Well, it was actually pretty different:
Carrying it Around
What I immediately noticed was that having the camera so easily accessible in my pocket was incredibly liberating. As good as I’ve gotten at unpacking my bag, pulling out my camera, potentially attaching to my tripod (I literally have actually practiced this to get quicker at it), nothing beats whipping the GR III out of my pocket and instantly starting to compose an image I can see in front of me. Where sometimes in the past I may have considered leaving the camera in the bag for a not-so-inspiring shot, with the Ricoh, I was shooting a lot MORE. This did end up meaning a higher percentage of “dud” photos when I got back into Lightroom, but for the image below, I may not have taken the photo if it required me to set up. My family was leaving the parking lot and getting ready to go, and I had a quick glimpse of a neat composition that I had only seconds to capture. The Ricoh made this photo possible.
Capturing the essence of the Oregon Coast. Cloudy, rainy, cold, intense waves - but still the Oregonians go for their walks along the shore. Rocky islands and evergreen tree.
However, one aspect about carrying it around, especially in Japan where it rained A LOT, is that the Ricoh is not weather sealed. It never became much of an issue, but I was definitely much more conscious while carrying it around and shooting in the heavy rain.
Shooting
One thing I definitely missed was having a viewfinder. The Ricoh doesn’t have one, and while the back screen is pretty good, I found in well-lit areas outside, it was sometimes hard to see what I was shooting. It was interesting though, to shoot more with the camera not directly at my eye, meaning that I was raising the camera or lowering it to ground more to get some interesting shots, because it never even occurred to me to shoot from eye level.
The low-light performance of the camera is stellar, and it worked surprisingly well in low-light without a tripod. I did not pack a tripod on either trip, and I was nervous taking photos in low-light, not sure what I would come home to when I loaded the images onto a 4k screen in Lightroom. But with a little bit of noise, the photos came out really sharp and colorful, and I was super pleased with how vibrant they were. The experience also taught me to be okay with inky black portions of my photos. I’d always tended towards having everything in the image visible, but this trip and the nighttime photo opportunities taught me to appreciate pitch black as negative space in a photo.
Overall Results
I’m super pleased with the results coming out of my Ricoh GR III. It won’t be a replacement for my mirrorless interchangeable lens camera on any landscape photography trips, but I love that I have a compact option to take with me on any trip I go on. It truly allows me to pursue my photography passion on any vacation I take, even if I don’t have enough room to pack my full gear.
I also really appreciate the freedom such a small form factor affords me, and will attempt to “shoot from the hip” a bit more with my A6700, or at the very least, shoot more without a tripod.
