A strong sense of deja vu pervades as I sit here writing about the arrival of my Ricoh GRD; it might have something to do with me buying a GRD back in January of this year and describing my elation when it was delivered… and then writing about it’s departure in March. You will be pleased to hear, however, that I have a list of excuses as long as my arm about why I sold my old Ricoh in the first place (You can even see some of those excuses paraded around in the second post when I waved it goodbye) and why it was actually a good thing that I did and how I am now stupendously better off because of it.
This is going to be good…

Let’s start with the philosophical and call this circuitous route to a GRD a “journey”. I originally bought a GRD on the back of the success of using my XA2 to document the 10 Countries Run. The freedom the little film compact gave over my hulking DSLR made a big impact on me, and with the possibility of giving myself even more freedom through the use of a digital compact, the search was on for a decent P&S. At this point I guess I really should’ve gone for my Fuji F20 straight away – it had so many more similarities with the XA2 than the GRD – but, magpie that I am I went straight for the snazzy, expensive “serious” compact… and when it turned out to be almost as fully featured as my DSLR it threw me a little. Cue a few brain tantrums, some grumblings at the cameras “failings” (more mine looking back on it; RTFM!) and a hasty sale… as well as the usual excuses. After that it was all about finding a P&S camera in the more literal sense of the phrase, and it wasn’t long before I snapped up a Fuji F20 on eBay to give myself a taste of the simple life. Problem was, as much as it was a really good camera (and, by the way, it totally wiped the floor with my sister’s F47 and my mum’s F50 image-quality-wise, especially at higher ISOs) I wasn’t completely happy… yet again. Despite thinking that all I needed was a more simple camera to take away much of the faff that goes with taking a photo, it turns out I needed all that faff to keep my mind focused on what I was actually trying to photograph. With the XA2, although it was super simple, the film inside the camera kept me focused: making the frame count was really important, as were little niggles like making sure I had a pushed film in my camera for the evening. With the F20, although it gave me the ultimate in technical freedom – I really could just point and shoot – I never engaged with the camera properly, never thought about the photograph properly and, more often than not, took a whole bunch of throwaway photographs of the same subject and never once got a decent shot out of any of them. That’s not to say that I didn’t take a few good photographs with the Fuji, but it had to go despite photographic evidence to the contrary…

Of course, you could argue that I could have overcome all of this if I’d really wanted to, and I guess you would be right. I’m sure I could’ve stopped myself at the moment I started to grumble at the GRD, or consciously applied myself a bit more with the F20, but for whatever reason I had to come to the conclusion the hard – and expensive – way that the camera I bought almost 12 months ago was the right one… I just didn’t know it back then.

I’ll leave some more excuses and some talk about the new GRD to the next post I think, lest this turn into a longer blog post than some of my old Uni essays!