Urban Experimentation with a Ricoh GR3X HDF

Image 1: Madness and chaos on Leake Street. Ricoh GR3x HDF multi-exposure mode and HDF on.

A trip to London always offers a myriad of photographic opportunities if you can stand the noise, overcrowding, high cost and general big-city discomforts. I took advantage of some work meetings in town and extended my day a bit to keep my creative brain from turning to mush.

I like to travel light, so took my tiny pocketable Ricoh GR3X HDF with me. This is proving to be a truly excellent camera. The image quality belies its size, and it is unobtrusive and subtle. It will sit in a trouser pocket without raising anyone’s eyebrows and fits in the palm of my hand, ideal for one-handed operation if you don’t mind contorting your shutter finger a bit.

With very bright sunlight, there promised to be a lot of shapes made by light and shadow from buildings, tunnel entrances, bridges and the like. I really enjoy finding locations that have huge contrast, and trying to puzzle out how to make a decent composition from them. Urban photography is a bit like landscape photography in this regard, with the challenge being to make something sensible from a chaotic or messy scene.

I’ve been thinking more about how to convey the feeling of being somewhere through my photography, and I was very much feeling the busy-ness, movement and randomness of the big city. It can be a confusing and overwhelming place. I decided to embrace the chaos and use double exposures to layer scenes on top of each other.

Leake Street is a graffiti-covered tunnel underneath Waterloo Station, and was my first port of call. Graffiti is encouraged, and it is really rather awesome to behold. It has become a tourist attraction in its own right and is usually very busy. There were some weird influencer types doing a photoshoot, urban artists spraying new designs, and a myriad of people taking selfies, riding bicycles and zapping through on electric scooters. Trying to get a single sensible shot was going to be difficult, but it was ideal for a double exposure approach.

The GR3 has a multi-exposure mode built in, called “Composite Mode”. You select it from the drive mode menu (the one that lets you do single shots, rapid-fire etc). I set it to “Average” as “Additive” and “Bright” we overexposing everything and needed very careful attention to composition, so not well suited for quick opportunist photography like this. Using the high contrast black & white recipe, I shot in RAW + JPEG to ensure I had a colour version if needed, while the screen showed the monochrome image to help with composing light and dark areas.

You can shoot many images in the composite, or just two as I was doing in this case. Basically you hit the shutter for image one, the camera displays the result on the screen, and then you can elect to reshoot it, shoot the next shot, or finish. Just soft-tapping the shutter would automatically go to “shoot the next shot”, and the screen would show the ghost of the first image and the new live scene superimposed onto it. Hitting the shutter again then takes that shot, creates a rough low-ish resolution composite, and asks you again if you want to ignore that second image and retake it, or take another to overlay, or finish. In my case I was only shooting two shots, so on hitting complete the camera creates the final composite.

The first shot is Image 1 above. Double-exposures work best when it is just-about-possible to make sense of the image. To do this, I would shoot the first image with a bright area in one half of the frame, and then the second image with a bright area in the other half. This creates a really interesting effect if you get interest in both “halves”.

Image 2: South Bank tourists. Ricoh GR3x HDF multi-exposure mode.

After some fun in Leake Street, I headed off to South Bank. Blazing sunshine and interesting shaped buildings, with lots of pedestrian overpasses to look down from. I always like getting interesting angles, especially from above. People were chasing their shadows which were crisp and sharp on the pavement. I found a nice overpass and waited for people to walk underneath. It was very busy so I didn’t have to wait for long.

But I was rather disappointed in the rather simplistic single shot images I was getting, so I decided to use Composite Mode again. The concrete formed ceilings of the South Bank centre made for an intriguing geometric first image, onto which I then overlayed a shot of four people walking beneath. I had picked this particular overlay approach because the geometric paving stones echoed the geometric ceiling design quite nicely. It makes for quite a nice, simple-yet-complex puzzle photograph with multiple elements making it up (Image 2 above).

Image 3: The second hand book stalls under Waterloo Bridge. Ricoh GR3x HDF multi-exposure mode.

This was proving to be a really enjoyable outing. I had to force myself to look at scenes in a very different way in order to figure out a double-exposure shot that would work. As I’ve written previously, I love this puzzle-solving approach to photography. I find it very challenging and rewarding.

Just along the South Bank is Waterloo Bridge, under which is a series of second-hand book stalls. It is a rather lovely setting, and as the afternoon was progressing the sun was getting lower and lighting the book tables under the bridge. I had a very good time working out what to shoot and how, so elected to get the first shot with some people on the right silhouetted against the sunlit side of the opposite side of the Thames, leaving a rather large dark area on the left. The second shot of the composite is looking directly down on an array of books, deliberately blurred to appear like I was “shooting through” to the main scene from the first shot.

Image 4: Leake Street again, topsy-turvy this time. Ricoh GR3x HDF multi-exposure mode.

I was drawn back to Leake Street again as the sun got lower. Shafts of light were in a different place from earlier in the afternoon, opening up some new opportunities. It was just as bonkers there the second time around, if not more so. People everywhere. Lots of “main characters” lacking any respect for other people as they did their influencing. Sigh.

There’s a little side-alley with some really cool laser-cut steel barriers at one end, with an arched ceiling patterned by weird wiggly graffiti. I thought the ceiling would make a good blend with another simpler shot, but I decided to shoot it in portrait mode and then do the second shot in landscape orientation. This created a really rather intriguing image, with the silhouettes of the people blended with the ceiling making it look like they had pattered clothing on, and the people in the alleyway at right angles. Quite a lot to unpack! Maybe a bit of overkill but great fun again.

Image 5. Just one frame, no composites.

I did take some “normal” photographs as well, with just a single frame and no compositing. The bright sunshine and deep shadows were stars of the show once again. Back at the Thames at the National Theatre, I took advantage of some more raised walkways and looked for people walking along a particular shadow line.

With the orientation of the sun, a person walking just inside the shadow would be lit against the shaded pavement, with their shadow emerging into the sunlit side.

The GR3 is an excellent camera for this sort of thing. I didn’t really miss a viewfinder at all especially as I was using the high contrast black and white mode. This makes it easy to see bold shapes in the compostion really easily.

The rear screen is plenty bright enough in direct sunlight to enable me to position elements in the frame even when holding the camera out over a parapet like in this shot.

Overall, it was a really good way to spend some time between business meetings. I hope you think I managed to capture the “feeling” of the place using the composite double-exposure approach. I certainly enjoyed trying to do so, which is the real point I think.