Occasionally Ricoh has delivered cameras to the market that are innovative, ingenious and unique. Like the Ricoh GR Digital III.

But who ever heard of a camera with a fixed lens and no zoom?

To answer, you have only to look at the major companies with their DSLRs. Fine cameras you say. But what makes them even finer is the availability of a fixed focus ‘pancake lens’.

The advantages are a small form factor along with high optical quality, a lack of aberrations in a no-zoom lens and reduced internal flare.

It was a touch too cold to dunk this camera — and its operator! — in the surf, so I resorted to a dip in the pool. And, to my surprise, I found that not only did the camera perform successfully but I fell upon a magic way to create stunning new pictures.

But back to the aquatic Canon. Via Olympus.

The latter company has made much of its success with the Tough digicams, successfully operable down to 10 metres underwater. I recently had great fun with the Olympus Tough 8000 and felt it was ideally suited to the Australian lifestyle: outdoors, wet and wild.

Belatedly, Canon has picked up the scent of this success and launched its own go-anywhere digicam: PowerShot D10.

CANON POWERSHOT D10 Features

It’s all there: waterproof down to 10 …

We knew it was coming but it still surprised many when Olympus threw away the last vestiges of a single lens reflex camera in a digital snapper that otherwise could have been called a DSLR.

Into the new PEN went the 4/3rds inch Micro Four Thirds Live MOS sensor. Out went the mirror box. Onto it went a large 7.6cm LCD screen. No optical viewfinder and no onboard flash. Quite a revolution.

You still get Program AE, shutter and aperture priority plus manual exposure modes, precise control of exposure and colour, as well as access to a rapidly increasingly range of interchangeable lenses from not only Olympus but Panasonic as well.

You can use the other Four Thirds system lenses as well as earlier Olympus OM lenses used by the company’s film SLRs, with adaptors for both.

The PEN is not a compact digicam. It’s not a DSLR. However, it does resemble the venerable film rangefinder style of camera — in digital form — with all its advantages.

Railway station, taken with 17mm lens.

Do you have a Battery Grip accessory for your DSLR?

A couple of years ago I wrote about my experience of buying a battery grip for my DSLR – while it added bulk and weight to my camera – I did find it had some benefits.

However two years later I have to say that I don’t really use it that often.

The only real times I’ve pulled it out have been on days that I know I’ve got to take a lot of images (weddings mainly). Otherwise It stays at home.

I’m interested to hear what others think – do you have a battery grip for your DSLR? If so – do you actually use it much?

Have you ever had a memory card fail on you? You’ve spent some time photographing an occassion, you’ve done your best and you’re excited about getting the images onto your screen and checking them out. You plug in your memory card and import your photos only to find half of them corrupt! or, even worse there are NO images on the memory card!

I asked the guys over at DigitalRev.com to help me out with a test that I wanted to run – we took two memory cards, a more expensive “well known” brand and a more budget “lesser known” branded CF card and ran them up in real world conditions along side each other to see how they performed.

First, I took the aData card along with me to a night at the Jazz Cafe to photograph a soul singer for Blues&Soul magazine. I wanted to get the job done and couldn’t afford to have any issues, so I figured that with this new card I’d have no trouble. I popped the card into my camera before the gig and formatted it a couple of times, took a few shots and formatted it again. I photographed the gig, checking my display from time to time to see that the images were recording OK and that my focus was as on as a 3″ screen will tell me. Arriving home, I imported the images into Lightroom from the new memory card that I was using and this is what I found…