square format – MikeHawkey.com

Another fine day in Auckland and another day where my schedule allowed me to bicycle to work. After reading an interesting article on The f8 Blog, by Olivier Duong, I decided to have a play around with the snap focus on my Ricoh. Its a feature that many GR owners love, especially for street shooting. A standard feature on all Ricoh GR cameras, I will have to give it a try some time on my GR1 also. The benefit? – I would suggest just reading Oliviers article, but essentially it allows you to pre-set focus, which along with a manually set aperature and shutter equals a very fast street snapping machine.

For today’s photo, I was on the street, but not quite street snapping. Hitting the road with the GRD IV set to B&W, I wanted to get a strong silhouette of shadow as the main section of the image. Did I need snap focus for this? no, not really, but it didn’t harm.

In post processing I cropped to square format. I could have done this in camera, but as I was riding my bike at the time, and its a fixed gear cycle, I decided post gave me a little more flexibility and slightly more safety. I pushed the contrast a little more and also adjusted sharpness.

Weekend time!

So…its not a brick road, or a yellow one at that, but ‘follow the orange flower trail’ didn’t have quite the ring to it that came to mind when I took, or view today’s image.

When out in the bush, in general, we get an amazing mix of forest colours – browns and greens essentially. These orange flowers that had fallen from the trees really stood out when we went through a trail in Fiji. When I captured the image, I was drawn to the trail of orange disappearing into the path ahead.

Originally captured in portrait, I went for a square format in my post processing – keeping all the subject matter in the image and not loosing anything of any relevance. Some people shoot a lot in square format – whether it be the traditional medium format 6×6 film, cropped digital or various smart phone apps. I do quite like the format, so may look at doing some more, probably B&W in it at some stage.

Cropping aside, I also pushed the saturation a bit to make the flowers pop, and slightly sharpened the image also.

Shot on the Ricoh GRD IV.

Tag: square format

The Bicycle

‘Follow the Yellow Brick Road’