The Little Camera(s) That Could

Today was errand day at the House of Fielding — errands before and after work. Eastside. Downtown. Uptown. Downtown. Eastside. Westside back home. While riding the streetcars and subways I was experimenting with the cameraphone to see what it was capable of. As with any mobile phone, the best conditions are always bright and outdoors. I was rather pleased with the sharpness of the numbers in the photo above.

You might be wondering: why even bother taking photos with such crappy phone cameras? They look terrible! Because for me what makes a good photo is its composition, and that has nothing to do with equipment. Deciding what to put in that frame is not just an interpretation of electronics and glass but instinct. You can have the most expensive camera in the world, but if the content is uninteresting, a good lens and expensive sensor cannot rescue it. So I am constantly on the lookout for how life fits in frames in interesting ways — what goes in, what stays out, looking ahead for two objects to cross paths at the perfect time, hoping a gust of wind blows that bottle to exactly where I want it, photographing the dog waiting patiently outside the store, watching for the break in the cloud for the sun to peek through. It’s not just taking a photo, it’s how the Germans translate it — “making a photo”. (And probably lots of other languages I don’t know.)

Today was a first, of sorts: I shelled out $15 for a 2GB micro SD card to expand the memory in the phone. Up ’til now I have always been far too cheap to splash out on memory for mobile devices, but the videocamera feature on this one won’t work at ALL without a media card. Previously I’ve always just cleared out photos and text messages (I’ve collected some of the weird ones to show), but I capitulated this time to avoid the dreaded “Memory Full!” message.

Testing how it handles backlighting:

I shot a short video on the streetcar before I had to disembark, and tonight when I converted the video from 3GP to mpeg (using Kigo Video Converter) then mpeg to mp4 (using Handbrake) — and that was after using Bluetooth to transfer the files from the phone to the computer! — the double-conversion somehow had the effect of speeding up the video (this is actual size):

It’s running at twice the original speed!

And finally, a photo taken not with the mobile but the 5-year old Canon A520, which you can buy from eBay these days for less than $10. Did you know there are manual settings on these digicams? It’s true — though limited, I set the aperture and shutter speed myself for this picture:

It was a funny moment that brought me to that tree. I was taking photos of the sunset by a hospital with the phone’s camera, and a patient in a wheelchair watched me take photos of the trees. He was a little far away, so when he called out to me I thought he was checking to see whether I was taking a photo of him (and asking me not to). I indicated I was only shooting the trees. A couple of minutes later, he wheeled up and told me I would find a much better tree next to the building behind some other trees, about 50m away.

“You’ll like that one,” he said excitedly. “It’s very twisty and people like to take pictures of it.”

He was right! And it was then that I figured out he wasn’t shooing me away two minutes before, he was waving me over to the tree! 

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