cellphone camera test

After hav­ing lived with­out a cell­phone for the last two cen­turies I finally took the leap. Not only did I get a cell­phone, I got a smart phone. The iPhones have been all the rage for a while, but I ended up select­ing an HTC MyTouch ser­viced by T-Mobile.

As some­one who’s a bit of a Lud­dite and who’s loudly protested cell­phones and cell­phone cul­ture, I’m almost ashamed to admit own­ing the device. Still, some­thing about the com­bi­na­tion of a device that is part-phone, part-camera, part-wireless router, part-web browser, part-music player, part-camcorder, part-GPS unit, part-nanny, part-godknowswhatelse seemed compelling.

The view look­ing north, up past Scripps Pier

Last week a good friend came to visit for a few days. A tourist trip up to the top of Mount Soledad, the high point of coastal San Diego, seemed like a good idea. Thurs­day was a break between win­ter storms, which meant that the vis­i­bil­ity could be pretty stunning.

Yes indeed. The views were ter­rific. Also, a lot of native plants sur­round­ing the lit­tle pad of green grass and park­ing at the top of the moun­tain were break­ing out into bloom.

Did some­one say “photo-op?”

Scar­let mon­key flower, Mimu­lus auran­ti­a­cus, but judg­ing from the focus the cam­era was more rapt with the view of La Jolla below.

Deer­weed, Lotus sco­par­ius, also frus­trat­ingly out of focus, no mat­ter how hard I tried to get the cam­era to focus on the flower instead of the back­ground foliage.

Since I didn’t have my real cam­era this seemed like a good test for the cam­era fea­ture on the new hand­held device. (Really, can you call it a phone anymore?)

Here’s a short stack of snap­shots I took up there. And yes, I con­sider them snap­shots, only snapshots.

I’m used to cam­eras with lots of con­trols. For con­trols, this model has a mod­er­ate zoom option and the abil­ity to turn the flash on or off or on auto­matic. That’s it for options. So, it does make for a simple-to-use cam­era, but it’s sim­ple to the point of being sim­plis­tic.

Coast sun­flower, Encelia cal­i­for­nica, show­ing both focus and expo­sure issues.

The flow­ers of lemon­ade­berry, Rhus inte­gri­fo­lia. Unlike my other attempts at close­ups, this shot came out clear and crisp–but still blown out in the highlights.

Achiev­ing good focus or get­ting an expo­sure that doesn’t over­ex­pose some­thing in the frame can be a chal­lenge. These are lim­i­ta­tions for lots of point and shoot cam­eras, so I don’t know that it’s any worse than some of them. Lens flare when you shoot into the sun can be a prob­lem, but that hap­pens with even the best of cameras.

The phone design­ers prob­a­bly real­ized that the cam­era would be liable to shake as you took a snap­shot. To com­pen­sate they applied a fairly extreme level of in-camera sharp­en­ing. For some images it’s barely notice­able, in oth­ers it’s so obvi­ous it hurts.

So as not to seem like I’m a total Mr. Neg­a­tive, there were a few things I did like. The wide 9:16 aspect ratio of the image–similar to the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion of televisions–is kin­duv cool and cin­e­matic. The 2:3 aspect ratio of old-school 35mm cam­eras is harder to work with and often feels unnatural.

A view with encelia and lemon­ade­berry in the fore­ground, as well as the ever-present coy­otoe­brush, baccharis.

That view again, this time with some chamise, Adenos­toma fas­ci­c­u­la­tum, in the fore­ground. I still have trou­ble decid­ing whether I’m in coastal sage scrub habi­tat or mar­itime chap­ar­ral. The pres­ence of chamise tells you that you’re in chaparral.

A view to the south. You could eas­ily see a cou­ple dozen miles into Mex­ico that day.

Col­ors looked pretty true to life.

And in the end there’s the much bet­ter chance that you’ll have the cell­phone cam­era handy when you’ve left the ded­i­cated cam­era at home. You may never miss another photo op again.

So…has life changed with a cell­phone? I can’t say that it has that much. It was handy to have when I was try­ing to nav­i­gate Philadel­phia a cou­ple weeks ago. It’s handy to keep in touch with peo­ple when you’re away from the land­line. And I guess I feel just a lit­tle bit more hip. Like, now, when peo­ple talk about angry birds, I real­ize chances are that they’re most likely talk­ing about the app and not what hap­pens when you dis­turb a nest.



February 26 2011 | Categories: photography • places | Tags: • • • • • • • | 12 Comments »

shopping with a camera

I swear that I’m not try­ing to look like Annie Liebovitz or some wacked paparazzo, but I often drag a cam­era along when I go look­ing for plants at nurseries.

I used to take a pad of paper and a pen, but this method has started to prove a lot more use­ful. I can quickly “jot down” the names of plants by tak­ing a pic­ture of the signs that most nurs­eries thought­fully provide.

Plant Sign at a nursery

Those signs often have inter­est­ing cul­tural infor­ma­tion as well. And if I’m taken with a plant I’ve never seen before, it’s easy to com­mit it to pix­els and bring the photo back home to think about whether the plant could pos­si­bly have a place in an already over­crowded garden.

And should Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie stroll through, I can dis­cretely snap their pic­ture for the next install­ment of Access Hol­ly­wood. I’m sure the world wants to know what plants they want to have in their garden.

November 07 2008 | Categories: gardening • photography | Tags: • • • | 5 Comments »

last Newport post: cameras/semi-mysterious tower

Walk­ing around town when I get breaks between meet­ings I’ve dragged along one of two cam­eras. One is a trusty roll film cam­era that I’ve been using for years, and the other is this embar­rass­ment of a dig­i­tal cam­era, the first dig­i­tal cam­era I bought John when dig­i­tal cam­eras were just com­ing out. I haven’t gone shop­ping to Toys R’ Us lately but I’d guess that it has the same megapixel capac­ity as a My Lit­tle Pony dig­i­tal cam­era today, if they make such a thing. At least it’s not pink. Maybe I should say that it has 1,300 kilopixels–certianly lots more impres­sive than 1.3 megapix­els. And on top of the low res­o­lu­tion it eats bat­ter­ies like crazy. Seri­ously I thought it had died and gone to dig­i­tal cam­era pur­ga­tory until I dropped into the gift shop down­stairs and fed the cam­era five bucks in bat­ter­ies. Might have been a good excuse to finally get myself a real dig­i­tal camera.

Since most of the pic­tures I took were with the film cam­era I’ll have to forgo the imme­di­ate grat­i­fi­ca­tion and wait to see the pic­tures until I get them devel­oped. But here’s one of the ran­dom dig­i­tal shots of a struc­ture located just above the down­town tourist dis­trict. Though it’s called many things, it appears on the map I have as the Old Stone Mill, though it’s doubt­ful that it was ever attached to any oper­a­tion like a mill. In fact, it’s appar­ently a bit of a mys­tery what it is exactly, and a bit of a mys­tery who built it. Appar­ently car­bon dat­ing of the mor­tar dates it to var­i­ous dates, some as late as the late sev­en­teenth cen­tury, some to the early 1400s.

Old Mill Tower

Call me a skep­tic, but just like peo­ple who claim their hotel is haunted, what mys­tery there might be well could be overblown and might have noth­ing to do with real­ity, though it’d cer­tianly be good for busi­ness. There are a lots of web pages where it’s dis­cussed: wikipedia of course; Curt F. Waidmann’s nicely researched The New­port Tower: a Medieval Ruin in Amer­ica; the Red­wood Library and Athenaeum’s page on it; and the more scandal-/mystery-driven page on Unex­plainedEarth. If any of those pages have any author­ity, Wikipedia points to the Red­wood Library’s pages, and I might go with that eval­u­a­tion: The library is located just across the street.

February 23 2008 | Categories: photography • rambles | Tags: • • • • | 1 Comment »