The Camera That's Always With Me

I've owned a Canon 5D Mark II with a 50mm f/1.2. A Fuji X100. A Sony A7III. A Sony A7C2. Every single one of them spent more time on a shelf than in my hands.

Not because they weren't great cameras. They were. But great doesn't matter if you don't bring it with you. And I never brought them with me.

The problem was always the same: quality or portability. Pick one. A full-frame mirrorless with a fast prime gives you incredible images, but it also gives you a camera bag, a lens pouch, a strap around your neck, and the constant awareness that you're carrying expensive gear in a crowded medina. So you leave it at home. And you shoot with your iPhone instead.

The iPhone is fine. It's gotten remarkably good. But "remarkably good for a phone" and "good" are two different things. You see it in the skin tones. You see it in the way it handles light. You feel it when you look at a photo six months later and something is just... off.

I was stuck between two compromises. Until I found a Ricoh GR III Diary Edition at a reseller in Casablanca, brand new, never used, at less than half the retail price. I'd been reading about it for a while but kept putting it off. At that price, there was nothing to think about.

Invisible

The GR III is smaller than most phones in a case. It slides into a jacket pocket, a jeans pocket, a coat pocket. It disappears. And that changes everything about how you take photos.

In Morocco, the moment you pull out a DSLR, people notice. They tense up, they look away, they wave you off, or they pose. The interaction changes. The moment is gone. But a tiny brown rectangle that looks like a compact point-and-shoot? Nobody cares. Nobody even registers it.

I shoot at the hip. Snap focus set to a fixed distance, press the shutter, done. No autofocus hunting, no delay, no missed moments. The image is captured before anyone realizes a photo was taken. That's street photography the way it should be: observing without disrupting.

Walking through Casablanca with the GR III in my pocket is the closest I've come to what I imagined photography would feel like when I first picked up a camera. Just seeing things and capturing them. No gear anxiety, no setup, no weight on my shoulder. Just eyes and a shutter button.

Family, unposed

Here's the thing nobody tells you about being a parent with a camera: your kids perform for the lens. The second they see a phone pointed at them, they either pose or hide. Years of smartphones have trained them. What you end up with is a library of forced smiles and peace signs.

The GR III breaks that pattern. It looks like nothing. My kids don't even register when I'm shooting. They keep playing, keep arguing, keep being themselves. The photos I get are candid in the truest sense: unaware, natural, real. These are the photos I'll actually want to look at in twenty years. Not the staged birthday shots. The in-between moments.

And because it's always in my pocket, I actually capture those moments. Family trips don't require packing a camera bag anymore. I just grab my keys, my wallet, and the GR III. It's become as automatic as bringing my phone.

Learning to see at 28mm

I spent years shooting at 50mm. It was my focal length; my Canon 5D Mark II with the 50mm f/1.2 was the combination that taught me to see. The compression, the shallow depth of field, the way it isolates a subject. That was my visual language.

The GR III shoots at 28mm. Wide. Very wide. The first few weeks were an adjustment. Everything felt too far, too wide, too much context. I kept wanting to zoom in.

Then something shifted. I started moving closer. I started including the environment instead of eliminating it. I started seeing scenes instead of subjects. The 28mm forced me to be more intentional about what's in the frame, because everything is in the frame.

And when I genuinely need to get closer, the sensor is sharp enough to crop without losing anything meaningful. An APS-C sensor with no anti-aliasing filter: the detail holds up even at aggressive crops.

No more editing

This might be the most radical change the GR III brought to my workflow: I stopped editing.

I shoot JPEG. Not RAW+JPEG. Just JPEG. I loaded a color recipe that matches exactly what I want: the tones, the contrast, the grain. When I want a different look for a specific trip or mood, I switch recipes through the Ricoh Recipes app. But I never open Lightroom anymore.

The photo comes out of the camera exactly how I want it. I transfer it to my phone through the GR World app, and it's ready. Share with family, post on my site, done. The entire workflow from shutter press to published photo takes less than a minute.

After years of shooting RAW and spending hours in post-processing, this feels like freedom. The camera makes the decisions I used to agonize over. And honestly, it makes them better than I did.

What nobody tells you

Everyone talks about the image quality, the size, the snap focus. Nobody talks about how genuinely fun this camera is to use once you get past the learning curve. The menus are deep, almost absurdly customizable. Every button can be remapped. Every setting can be fine-tuned. It rewards you for spending time with it.

And nobody mentions how fragile it is to dust. The lens retracts into the body, and that mechanism can pull in particles over time. I researched this before buying and took precautions: small pieces of tape over the microphone ports and exposed openings. No issues so far, but it's something every GR III owner should know about.

What comes next

If you've seen my wishlist, you know the Leica Q3 43mm is on there. It's the logical evolution: a full-frame sensor with a focal length that's close to my beloved 50mm, and Leica's color science which is in a league of its own. If I pull the trigger on it, the GR III will probably find a new owner.

But that's a testament to what the Ricoh taught me, not a criticism of it. It showed me that the best camera isn't the one with the best specs. It's the one you actually carry. The one that becomes part of your routine instead of an event. The one that captures Tuesday afternoon at the park, not just Saturday's golden hour.

The GR III gave me back something I'd lost somewhere between the 5D Mark II and the A7C2: the simple habit of taking photos every day. No preparation, no intention, no pressure. Just a pocket-sized box that turns moments into memories.

If you're a photographer drowning in gear, selling half of it and buying a GR III might be the best creative decision you'll make.