Home»People, portraits, candids»RX100 - Street photography in China

A selection of images taken with the RX100. I bought this little Sony in Beijing at the beginning of my China tour mid-October 2012, complementing the Leica M9 I had with me. It turned out to be an enlightened decision, as the versatility of the Sony proved to be extremely helpful. I used it most of the time in B/W mode, with Contrast and Sharpness bumped up to +1. Most shots right out of the box were completely usable, and so the images posted here "suffered" very little processing.

A couple of observations on using this camera in B/W for street photography (which is not something I usually engage in):

AF focussing is very quick to lock on, and usually very accurate.

Regarding "sharpness", there are some "soft" pictures posted here which I still consider useful and "athmospheric". The RX100 is capable of excellent sharpness, though, although it is compromised at times by build-in NR, which gives the files a rather digital look. Nothing like the M9 with a 28 or 35 Cron, but that's besides the point.

I used the regular B/W setting, as I found the "scene mode" High Contrast B/W missed out on all the mid-tones. The Leica D-Lux 4 has a dynamic B/W setting which is spot on (mostly), it was that sort of smooth "look" I was trying to recreate with the much snappier and more powerful RX100. Not all images posted here are representatives of that "smooth" look, but most are.

When using the Scene mode setting "Rich-tone BW", in-camera processing time would become disproportionately slow, although the results were mostly worthwhile. On some rare occasion, this particular mode created a wavy or bee-hive type patterned background which would require some heavy lifting in Photoshop to remove.

Most images posted were taken in A mode, although that's just a habit of mine carried over from the Leica I suppose. With F1.8 the A mode did manage to create some nice background blur, though.

The RX100 JPG files are of course not as malleable as the JPG files from, say, my A900, but they are quite tweakable. One has to be careful to expose properly as pulling shadows up after the fact can be a tricky endeavor. I mostly used center-weighted metering, as - again - this is what I am used to from the Leica. Overall, the metering choices are totally adequate and produce very accurate results (there's always user error, of course, especially with a new camera).

High ISO is a non-issue, at least until 1600. I did't use Auto ISO very often at all, but it's a feature one doesn't need to worry about in terms of IQ.

Thomas H. Hahn
Ithaca, NY
November 13, 2012