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Selected Excellence: The Sad Clown

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As a climax to finish the "compacts for portraits" discussion of this week and to encourage you to start taking portraits with your compact, here is an indoor portrait by Mark with his GRD. Mark has actually done an awesome lot of great indoor portraits on his blog, An American Peyote Scribble. His saying that photography is "for guys who aren't into drag [drug]" is very true. Visit his blog and you will read that he is addicted to photography enough to learn even how to handle makeup for portraits!

(Courtesy and copyright of Mark Melnykowycz. Taken with GRD

The Sad Clown story by Mark: He has little ambition or direction in life, schooled on the streets and usually found sleeping in the gutters of Paris, he sports a stripped sweater, yellow button-down shirt by Ben Sherman, and occasionally a sport coat by "WE" and a tie by the same label. The Sad Clown smokes 15 year old cigarettes and laments on the laughs he cannot produce due to this wasted life on the stage.)


By Mark Melnykowycz: You can see in this view that the eyes couldn't be sharper. This is one reason to use a Ricoh Digital over a massive DSLR with an 85mm f/1.4 lens, the quality of small sensor Ricoh GR portraits include very sharply defined lines -- and when properly exposed, excellent subject-background separation. I don't think it would really even be feasible to produce an image like this using my Minolta 7D, or any other DSLR, unless using a very long lens to compress the image and increase the depth of field by using a very small aperture. With the Ricoh GR and Alzo Digital Softboxes, it took 5 minutes to setup and execute this portrait in a very confined and cluttered space.


Every piece of equipment has it's limitations, and in total the 40mm is an excellent lens, extending the usability of the GR digital system considerably. With the 21mm and 40mm lenses, you have an excellent small sensor camera system, suitable for travel, landscapes, city, portrait, and the production of unique images with studio lighting techniques. Well, actually, you can use it for whatever your heart desires -- go out and make the Sad Clown smile again.


(For the full version of Mark's Sad Crown story, read here)
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