Halloween Day Two

I really do like my new iPhone. This is an early image that I made in Virginia, not on the farm, but in a small city called Waynesboro. We mostly go there for food, either groceries or take out Chinese , Thai or Japanese food. Even though we do eat in restaurants when we are on the road, we are very careful and prefer to eat take out. So, that’s what we do.

Check out the quality. I softened the image with a filter called glow, but look how sharp the details are. You can almost feel the cloth.

That said, I doubt we’ll have many trick or treaters. We are more-or-less at the end of the road. Our two lane road splits about 100 yards away into two single lane country roads. There is a combination cafe, grocery store, coffee shop, post office and about a billion churches of every denomination at the split.

Back to the phone.

In the days when the United States was still trying to tame Iraq, a New York Times photojournalist called Tyler Hicks photographed a battalion of Marines in combat… with his phone, which was probably an iPhone 6. The photographs were amazing. They were as close and tight as you could possibly make in combat.

Hicks said that two things happened to help him make those pictures.

He wasn’t weighed down by a lot of photo gear. He left that at whatever base he was living at, all he brought was two phones. He was fluid.

Soldiers, marines and everybody on the front lines were used to seeing phones. They took selfies, pictures of each other and whatever they saw. So, a guy dressed just about as they were, taking pictures with an iPhone didn’t even register with them.

The pictures were real. They were authentic.

I’m not photographing any kind of war and I don’t intend to, but the potential for making meaningful photographs is there. I have no idea what they’ll be, but they’ll reach out and show me what to do. Eventually.

There are plenty of phone photography contests that you can view. Every time that I do I’m amazed at the images. I shouldn’t be. Gear really doesn’t matter. The photograph does.

Make no mistake, Apple isn’t paying me to write this stuff. I many ways, I don’t even like them as a company. They are very overbearing and protective. It’s taken forever to get them to allow you to repair your own phone. When they do, they send a 70 pound box with a bunch of tools and one tiny little part that you actually need.

I need to repair an iPad with a known fault. The charging port wears out fairly quickly. Apple wants $600 to repair something that takes ten minutes to repair. You can get it done locally for about $125 or you can ask them for the box and do it yourself for free.

We are currently friends with our FEDEX and UPS delivery guys and we’d like to remain that way. But delivering and picking up a 70 pound box might not endear them to us.

That’s the report from the valley.