Newbie question re aperture

[allcity67]

Hi all, first post here and an extreme novice at photography. Having said that, excuse the ignorance of this post. :?

I've had a GR III for a few months now and love it. So much so that today I went and bought a GXR P10 with the 28-300mm lens. I usually use the camera's Manual mode and adjust the shutter & aperture myself. I can adjust the shutter speeds like normal but aperture (on all modes) is limited to only 2 speeds. I assume it has something to do with the zoom since when I zoom the aperture changes.

Is there a way to manually change the aperture to any speed? Not sure if this is a camera problem or overall photography question but I've been searching online for a couple hours now and I'm stumped. Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thx

 

[odklizec]

Hi allcity67 and welcome on the board!

I'm afraid, the P10 does not allow the same range of apertures as GRD or other GXR modules. Basically, the P10 module is based of Ricoh CX camera, where the aperture is also limited to just two numbers at the wide end and three at the tele end.

From my own experience with P10, I would recommend you to stick with the lowest number at the wide end, and use the lowest or highest aperture at the tele end. The highest number at the wide end and the middle number at the tele end are visibly affected by the diffraction effect, which makes the photos noticeably softer. It's weird, but the highest aperture number at the tele end looks noticeably sharper than the middle aperture number. I can only guess that the highest aperture number at the tele end is not achieved by a real aperture, but by an internal ND filter?

Hope this helps?

 

[allcity67]

Oh ok got it. Will a different lens make a difference? I like the zoom on this lens but its hard getting a shot in low light without raising the ISO.

 

[odklizec]

Sure thing. Different lens and/or sensor would make a lot of difference. For example, GXR A12 modules are usable without problems up to ISO3200 and the images are less noisy/smeared than photos from P10 at ISO400. P10 uses the same lens/sensor as CX cameras. And these cameras everything but ideal for low light photography. The A12 contains several times larger sensor, which makes it perfectly usable under low light.