Spring still sprung

[bill_schubert]

Cameras have come so far in my lifetime.  I had a wonderful Konica when my first son was born.  It was mostly manual and I was a mediocre photographer as usual not having the patience to do what is really a very precision type of process.  But I lugged the thing all over and kept a notepad of my shots and got fairly good.  Nothing like I can do with my camera now, of course.

Same picture taken three ways:

Normal mode

Portrait mode general focus

Portrait mode focusing on a specific flower

The difference in these three shots is truly amazing to me.  

Oh, and yeah, it is a wonderful morning for a Zoewalk in central Texas.

Comments

[susandennis]

very cool. i use almost .5% of my camera's capabilities.

[bill-schubert.livejournal.com]

I don't use much more but I do like the portrait mode for shots like this and the focus is amazing.

[maju01.livejournal.com]

Amazing what can be done with a comparatively tiny device that can be carried easily in a pocket. I bought a DSLR about 15 years ago but it's now languishing in a cupboard. To use it, I had to be taking a photo walk, not trying to exercise and taking photos at the same time.

[bill-schubert.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that has been my issue all along. One can either be or one can record. The latter tends to corrupt the former. When I had the Konica I enjoyed being a photographer. We lived in NYC and needless to say there was a lot of grist for the photo mill. But this phone is the best of all worlds. I can, if I want, take a fairly good photo and not be a photographer. The phone is a Pixel and the hardware/software combo is truly amazing.

[maju01.livejournal.com]

I've had a Pixel for almost three years and I absolutely love the camera.

[msconduct.livejournal.com]

The "be or record" struggle is real. I did a trip to Churchill in northern Canada to watch polar bears, and one day I was out on the back of the polar rover (standing on the open deck of the vehicle, but too high up to be eaten by a bear) and a polar bear stood up on its hind legs right in front of me. This isn't a usual thing, I was just very lucky. I had a split second to decide whether I was going to experience that moment through a camera viewfinder or just enjoy it. I opted not to take the photo, and I'm very happy I did. I can't imagine a photo would ever be as vivid as my memory of that experience.

As a result of that, on my first trip to Botswana I elected not to take a camera at all and didn't regret it. I did take one on my second trip there but I tried to be very selective about when I was shooting instead of having it to my eye all the time. It's amazing how much more immersive things are when you're not worrying about getting the shot.

[bill-schubert.livejournal.com]

And there are really good photographers who already took that picture and have it available online now.

Very cool about the polar bear.

In retrospect I probably would have gotten some great shots during my tours in the Navy. Probably would have gotten arrested too.

[stainsteelrat.livejournal.com]

The immediacy of seeing the results with digital photography is truly a revolution.

[bill-schubert.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it is. I used to walk around with a notebook and take notes on each shot just to try and remember what I was trying to do. It was all black and white because I could not afford color. On the one hand it made me pay attention and I had to be frugal with the shots. No takebacks. And ultimately I stopped since I didn't develop my own pictures and that is where the magic was. All that is gone now for good or ill.

[msconduct.livejournal.com]

That macro shot is simply gorgeous. Phone cameras have come such a long way.

I have a good DSLR and long lenses because I do a lot of nature travel, and I do appreciate that I get shots I couldn't get from a general purpose camera. Because wild animals are singularly uncooperative about coming up and posing, everything would just be a series of tiny dots in the distance. But my problem is that while I love the shot-framing side of photography, try as I have always done to interest myself in the technical side I can't do it. I just find it too boring. So I don't get the benefit out of the camera I should. Last time I was on a nature trip the guide told me I absolutely had to have the new Canon $3,000 zoom lens. At which point I had to face the fact that I was never going to be the kind of photographer than would justify that. In comparison, taking shots with a phone is delightfully simple.

[bill-schubert.livejournal.com]

I bought a DSLR a few years ago and played with it a bit. After it sat in the drawer for a while longer I got rid of it. Same here. I just don't have the fascination with the process that is required to do it right.

[amw.livejournal.com]

I've often wondered, since i started getting phone cameras that did this stuff out of the box, do they actually, legitimately use real hardware lenses with optical zoom, or is this just a software filter?

It seems like these "portrait modes" started appeared around the same time i was in China and the Chinese phones started activating beautify filters by default, so everybody's face started looking like plasticine. As a result of that hijacking of my actual observed reality, now i've become skeptical of every photo that comes out of a phone camera. It seems like there is always some kind of trendy post-processing that you can't undo. I still don't trust my Pixel 3a to actually take a picture "straight" - since one of the recent Android updates it always seems to blur something out, even outside of portrait mode.

I think what bothers me is that i always used to trust cameras to record the "truth", while my memories got fuzzy. Especially at parties and stuff where i was intoxicated. But now i know cameras are recording some kind of idealized version of reality, i don't know if i can trust anything any more. Perhaps it doesn't matter.

[bill-schubert.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, software totally skews even the simplest picture taken with a phone. And then Google gets in the act and 'enhances' it further. I've always seen photography in the same vein as any kind of rendering. Ceci n'est pas une pipe.

Even looking at Ansel Adams laboriously realistic pix leaves me with a feeling that it never really looked like that.

[amw.livejournal.com]

This is a good take. I suppose photography, software enhanced or not, will always have some level of manipulation involved in picking the angle and the frame and the lighting. And, at the end of the day, when you go back to remember something that happened a long time ago, it doesn't really matter any more what the actual reality was, it just matters how you reacted to it and how it changed your life. So if the photo captures that - even it doesn't capture "truth" - that's still worthwhile.

[bill-schubert.livejournal.com]

Yeah. It is amazing what just taking a picture brings up. I follow a lot of solipsism kind of thinking. Part of that is my innate self centeredness, part is just the logic of the concept, part is its ingrained Buddhist bent (and mine). So the only reality is what is viewed through my eyes and processed in my brain. And every picture is its own reality and, since I'm not the same person nest time I look, it changes every time it is viewed.

I vacillate between pulling the threads of philosophy like that and think it is total bullshit.

Both are valid. Schrodinger's picture.