Seems a bit like summer. At least in this picture. Of course, it’s spring. Sometimes one fills in for the other.
Often in picture making or film making one thing approximates another. There are filters that the movie business uses called “Day for Night.”
I’ve used it on some photographs. It may work when the image is moving, but for still images the effect is just too blue. Every time that I forget and use it I spend a lot of time working on the image to bring it back to something that looks like night time.
But, this picture. It fell right in to the right color palette. Unfortunately, I used my smart phone. Look at the picture carefully. What is the only thing that is sharp?
The fence in the far background.
That’s where the phone focused. I have no idea why. It’s back focused as it could be. If I’m basically working in auto everything I have no idea how to tell the phone what’s important to me. There is a patch that you can place over a section of the scene as you see it in the LCD. I put the patch where I wanted it.
No joy. If anything, that patch made it harder to focus on anything.
Did I mention that I really hate the whole idea of digital capture? Not only does it make actually photographing a little harder, but it’s bringing up a second generation of young photographers who think “spray and pray” is the thing to do when they are photographing anything including a rock.
That’s not where I intended to go with this. I wanted to talk about figuring out how to use a phone in auto everything mode and get the results that I want.
Yes, I know that there are ways of using a smartphone’s camera manually. Have you ever tried that? You better be photographing a rock. In the time that it takes to do the manual settings, the subject could have moved ten times.
Anyway.
Grumble, grumble, grumble. Toil and trouble.
I just about said everything I could say about the failings of this picture in the left hand column.
On the other hand, it is an interesting scene. Maybe when I return I can re-photograph it with a real camera.
We’ll see.
I dislike visiting the same scene twice. I’d like to believe that, but as I’ve mentioned in the past I’ve photographed some of these places at least 20 time, four times during each season and over the past five years that we’ve lived here.
You’d thing with that repetition the pictures would get better.
Oh nooooo.
They are technically worse. Much worse. I’ve changed cameras three times during that time. I’ve used one DLSR and two phones that followed.
What am I doing? A this late stage in my photographic career technological issues should be a thing of the past. The way past.
This means only one thing. War. Back to the mirrorless bodies that don’t even have shutter slap.
I’ll see you then.
STORYTELLER 
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