My primary goal last Sunday was to test out the current iteration of my flash setup before I'll need it in earnest on 7/4, and on that front: everything works well enough, but I do still wish I had more output. (To see what I was doing last July as part of my flags project see here)
My secondary goal was to practice composing for panoramic crop on the fly. I often like pano crops with the GRIII plus wide-angle adapter (21mm equivalent) but I only occasionally compose photos with it in mind to begin with, especially in situations where I'm not taking my time.
I'd like to try figuring out how to mask the Ricoh optical viewfinder at some point, but for now, I can sort of get in the vague ballpark by using the inner framelines (the ones intended for 28mm-equivalent) as the vertical boundaries and the outer framelines (intended for the 21mm-equivalent wide angle adapter) as the horizontal boundaries. (I really do think that Ricoh should add in-camera panoramic aspect ratios. I bet they'd sell GW-4 units.)
X-Pan Crop
Having watched a few too many film hipster youtube videos lately, I wanted to see what could be done with crops in the X-Pan ratio, which is 2.7:1. And holy shit, it is hard to compose for that, lol. I wound up getting too close in a lot of scenes and having to either throw away a ton of information or give up and fall back to a different aspect ratio. Being too close is not usually the problem with that setup lol.
By the way, in case anyone else is curious, I fed some numbers into an angle of view calculator to get a sense of how the Ricoh setup relates to the lenses that were made for the X-Pan. (Answer: it falls between the 30 and 45.) Interestingly 16mm on full frame, when cropped, is quite close to the X-Pan 30.
| Camera w/2.7:1 crop | Lens | Horizontal Angle of View | Vertical Angle of View | Diagonal Angle of View |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Canon RP | 16 | 96.7 | 45.2 | 100 |
| XPan | 30 | 94.6 | 43.6 | 98.2 |
| GRIII | GW-4 | 84.6 | 37.2 | 88.2 |
| XPan | 45 | 71.7 | 29.9 | 75.2 |
| GRIII | 68.9 | 28.3 | 72.4 |
2:1 (Give or Take)
2:1 is much easier for me to compose, particularly when operating at speed. It seems to naturally suit a lot of scenes. I use it relatively frequently so it's less of a jump.
