lyme regis

Some shots from Lyme Regis on Wednesday with the Ricoh GRD IV.    I had only just got the camera so was not too sure about all the settings at that stage. Luckily I soon figured out the basics like how to disable jpeg, as this just takes up extra disk space. I got a "free" 8GB card with the camera, which was supposed to be class 10, but looks like a class 4, as a raw was taking about 4 seconds to write to memory. I have switched to a class 10 card so writes are now a lot faster. A handy feature I started using today was the "level" facility which is a sort of digital spirit level - very handy for keeping sea horizons level. There are a lot of customisations available, like remembering the last menu item you were working with, "auto hi" means it will choose the best ISO automatically (from a range of 80 to 3200), and you can choose the minimum shutter speed before it activates, such as 1/30s. They do not have any of the extended hi/lo ISO settings like you will find on a Nikon SLR, but these seem a bit pointless to me. The camera has VR/anti shake, which means slow shutter speeds can be more easily used. The camera came with a wrist strap, but I did not find much use for this so just use it without a strap. I can easily put it in my pocket if I need 2 hands for other tasks (eg carrying pints of beer from the bar) The battery seems to hold out well, but blanking the screen involves toggling between the 5 preview modes (info, info/histogram, preview only, guidelines, blank). Other handy things are being able to program the 2 function buttons for quick access to certain menus, like snap focus mode and snap focus distance (these override normal AF when you need to take a quick shot without relying on the camera to autofocus first)