Homegrown

New smart phone, new camera… a lot easier to work with. I never thought I’d say this, but sometimes gear can make a difference.

When I switched to Samsung I was trying to get away from the Apple ecosystem. I think that most Apple gear is overpriced and that the folks who lead the company are arrogant.

How arrogant? They’ve managed to let Windows catch their products at a time when Apple was almost crash free. Now, they are about the same depending on what your main use is for the gear.

How overpriced? My new iPhone is reasonably priced because I managed to wrangle a deal out of my carrier, but think about this. New EarPods are about $500. Huh? For that amount of money I could be some really good over the ear headphones that would blow away anything a pod could do.

One reason to return to Apple is the camera. I’m not sure that either Apple or Samsung is that much better depending on who released phones last. I find the iPhone to be sharper and more contrasty than the Samsung camera.

More importantly, when I push what amounts to a shutter release button it does what I tell it to. I can put the camera down on the ground without me having to crawl around in order to make my picture.

These giant plant leaves are nothing more than blades of grass. I did it to test the phones ability to make a picture like this.

It worked just as I’d hoped for.

Big, huge blades of grass. That was my dream, to make a picture of grass.

Not really. I just wanted to see if the phone could do it.

It did.

My technique was simple. I set that lens at about 2.5 times the normal field of view. I bent over, putting the bottom of the phone on the ground. I pushed the button a couple of times.

That’s it. Done.

I tinkered with it a lot in post production because that’s who I am. And, I wanted to make the finished picture a little mysterious. After all, these are just blades of grass.