I enjoy going to the gym but even for someone like me, I do find it hard sometimes to stay an extra 30 minutes and do cardio. So, I packed my little Ricoh GRII in my gym bag and went for a walk outside afterwards instead. By the time I finished my workout it was around 8:00pm. Seeing as how the sun sets at around 9:30pm I knew I had a bit of time to get some golden hour photos. My plan was to walk to the Marina and then get my son to pick me up with the car. That way I could just focus on taking photos and not worrying about leaving enough time to walk back.

I had no planned route in mind, I just followed what caught my eye, as I usually do when walking the streets. I often end up heading down back alleys and see what I can discover there. What I love about the Ricoh is that it forces me to shoot differently. When I use my full frame cameras I almost always have a lens with shallow depth of field, and I use it a lot. But with the Ricoh, I need to work the scene more and also composition.

I’m always impressed with the GRII. The colours, the sharpness and just the joy factor of using it. Even as the light got low outside, it still performed very well. I’m not afraid of noise, and I’ll even add noise to a lot of my photos to give them some texture.

Even though I don’t always use the GRII, even though I should, I always wonder why I haven’t when I do end up picking it up. That’s the problem with having a lot of cameras I guess.