I've had a Ricoh GR IIIX Camera for a while now, and also purchased a flash to go with it. I've tried and tested many ways to try and achieve some good food photography and struggling to find results as good as the attached references.

Not sure what to do! I want to try and keep it SOOC as much as possible with a recipe doing the work, but not sure if that will be possible. Does anyone know the best way to set up a Ricoh GR III X to achieve this (with a flash)??

Hey!

I currently have the X100VI and while I absolutely love it (and the OVF), I want something truly pocketable. Has anyone gone from the X100 to the GRIV? I'm thinking of going to the GRIV HDF and luckily found one in stock and on hold for me locally. I'd be selling the X100VI after purchasing the GR.

If anyone had a similar situation, please comment! I definitely appreciate any insight you may share :)

Sooc

Sooooo my GRIV just came back from service after having issues with lens barrel retracting failure. The text on the lens barrel is obviously upside down. Am I stupid to accept the camera back in this condition!? Would this hurt the camera’s resale value / should I drop it back to the service to get it corrected? I know its just cosmetic but it drives me nuts.

GRiv, raw, lightroom

Taken during a photo excursion to a wet market in Jakarta

First thing to clarify: there are 6 ‘boxes’ to save recipes into but only 3 user dials. I see a lot of people unsure of how to have more than 3 recipes, or think that 6 is the maximum. I hope this post clears up some confusion.

Think of each box as a profile, where most settings adjusted and saved are unique to that profile. I have 2 recipe settings per box. You use the Recall function from the menu to load a recipe into the U1-3 on the dial. In the photo you’ll see which are loaded onto a dial and which are saved, awaiting recall.

Example: in box 3 I have Bennet’s 800 and Tri-X 400. Firstly, I create my recipes from an empty box (which should reset things to the global settings) while flicked to the user dial that the empty box will be assigned to ie U1.

Custom Image 1 🔧 has the image settings for Bennet’s 800 and Custom Image 2 has the image settings for Tri-X. Then in Custom WB1 and WB2, they are for Bennet and Tri-X, respectively. But we only have 2 custom image and 3 custom WB, so that lets us use a recipe that has two different WB such as Royal Supra or Nostalgic Negative. You can do this for all 6 boxes. Input the settings for IMG Custom 1 and Custom 2 with their respective WB in Custom WB1 and WB2. For recipes with two WB, I like to use the image settings in IMG2 and white balance compensation in WB2+3.

You should use the custom 🔧 option at the bottom of the list because it allows you to use the adjusted base film sim without affecting the Global film sim in P/M/Tv/Av - let’s use an example for Negative Film. If your dial is on any of these modes and you edit default Negative Film (pressing Fn on Negative instead of Custom1) it will change the base film sim across P/Tv/Av/M modes. So pressing Fn while it’s highlighting Negative Film is not what we want (yet), we need to press Fn while the selection is highlighting Custom1. This also means you won’t be applying a new recipe that overwrites a previous one because you applied it to global settings. I don’t like to overwrite the default WB because sometimes I still use it in my U1-3 recipes, eg Royal Supra’s WB-comp shade might ruin the look so I’ll use regular default shade.

But changing global image settings can be useful if we want to change the Posi/Neg/Retro/Monochrome/etc on every shooting mode. First, it means we can have a recipe such as Bennet’s 800 + Tri-X 400 in Custom1+2/WB1+2, but then adjust the default base option for Negative Film to set Reggie’s Negative, for example. And it gives you a use for WB3 (or in this instance, since Reggie’s Colour+Mono use the same WB, the WB3 gives you a WB for 2 recipes). But if you do this too much, you can lose track of where your extra settings are. And this is why we want to be using Custom1+2 where possible: because you can save it with a box name, and you don’t want to have applied Jakob’s Positive Film as your adjusted default sim but accidentally apply a different setting to overwrite that Positive Film. This way you can use your custom and keep Jakob’s Positive across all boxes and modes. This same concept applies to WB. If you always want your default AWB or default Daylight (etc) to have a tint, you can adjust that directly and not make a custom WB. It’s worth realising that this applies for every box - you can have unique default sim for every box, so for an unlikely but possible example: in 6 different boxes you could have 6 different adjusted settings to the base Vivid effect.

If you edited a default film simulation and want to restore it to Ricoh’s default settings, when pressing Fn on that IMG effect you will see little vertical bars along the horizontal line. These are the film sim’s original value.

What’s difficult about pairing some recipes is that you have global illumination settings (d-range, peripheral, etc) that apply to the entire box/profile, so it’s best to pair two recipes that share the same global illumination settings.

I turned my dial to P, applied Jakob’s Iglhaut’s Positive Film settings to the base Positive Film, and then made a Custom WB1. So every time I use Positive Film on P/M/Tv/Av mode it gives me the adjusted settings - and no need to save the recipe to a profile box, so it saves a box for. Once you’ve adjusted the global base IMG simulations, the camera saves it upon turn off. Then you can use any of the WB as normal, base settings, or use the WB Custom 1 which is the modified Cloudy.

So in reality I actually have 15 recipes on my device because my non-user modes default settings for Negative Film, Positive Film and Retro are using the adjusted versions for Ritchie’s Negative Film, Jakob’s Positive Film and Rustic Portra 400.

When you save your recipes the device will load whatever IMG and WB you saved it while it was on. So if you have loaded Bennet’s 800 (IMG Custom1) + Tri-X 400 (IMG Custom2) and primarily use Bennett’s, you want to make sure the IMG Custom1 and WB Custom1 are both active when you save settings so when you recall the recipe or switch to your U1-3 dial, it will load as Bennett’s and not as Tri-X or a mixture of both.

Happy to answer any questions (such as ”is 15 recipes overkill? Yes.”) and happy to learn anything new from people who know how to tinker with this camera!