A life around captured with the wonderful Ricoh FF-3.

 

This post will be a little bit more technical oriented, so for these who less interesting in these details, they can just skip the text and go straight to the series of photos.

Since the days when i “lost” my analogue pocket monster Ricoh GR1s camera, whose leaf shutter suddenly stopped working and i developed two rolls of the unexposed perfectly black bricks, i have been in deep thought about which camera i would like to have for my daily “snapshots” on celluloid. My other pocket, digital Ricoh helped me to “complete” this mission, but eventually it too went to the other world of stuck in obscurity, and waiting for the repair, that is already taking too long time. Some time ago I remembered about Yasica T2 which i bought 10 years ago, and it needed some rare battery. My friend helped me with the battery and i got this camera fully working, new conditions, helping me on my life documentary journey. But nothing is perfect and i wanted to have a little bit more control over my camera.

I have read countless reviews and opinion articles about most of the available analogue P&S cameras. But my interest was in something a little bit more advanced, and not fully automatic. I don’t like to use cameras with the DX-Code Auto-Detection feature which was introduced in 1983 when almost all film cameras started reading the pre set speed of the film rolls. I prefer to use my own decision what a speed of the loaded today film, or even to play with the number when exposing the same roll, +- 1 stop can’t kill a BW film. My Ricoh GR1s and Yashica T2 are fully automatic in all what is DX code about. Yes i can hack the DX code of any roll by covering the necessary areas with tape or by scratching the other areas on the film canister, but sometimes I’m replacing the finished roll somewhere in the middle of the world and can’t play with the screwdriver in this moment. That’s why some cameras are still have (or used to have) this manual function.

An additional option/function of most of small P&S cameras is the automatic flash, and the Yashica is too annoying with it’s flash which is enabled by default. Another point of my “research'” into P&S cameras was the battery. I really prefer using simple AA or AAA batteries instead of the various replacements for the old types of batteries, which are also usually very expensive for the amount of roll you can photograph with set of batteries. I also often use the camera’s flash which is a real battery killer.

On my research list were the Yashica T AF, Konica MG, COSINA CX-70 AF, Minolta AF-S, Minox – GT-E II, Nikon L35AF and some other less interesting, but very popular due to the hype around this type of cameras. In the end, my choice fell once again on the Ricoh FF-3 AF P&S camera. It arrived from Japan just in 9 days and it’s took another week to complete the first test roll, that I’m going to show you today. I “tested” the camera in the various lighting conditions, with flash and without flash. The ISO of this camera is fully manual as is the flash. I’d like to have some additional manual control – shutter speed or aperture or the exposure compensation, but for now I’m happy with what I’ve got.