not 
New Phone
Posted by Aphra Behn on July 24, 2006
It wasn’t my fault, ok.Well, the being in Bristol on the wrong day was my fault, I guess. But the upgrading the mobile phone wasn’t. Really it wasn’t. I’d left at 7.00am. It was now 9.30. It was, as I said, the wrong day. Who would turn round and go hammering straight back along the motorway again on such a hot morning? A nice cup of tea and maybe a little window-shopping - where’s the harm in that? Flicking through the papers and drinking a Chai Latte, perhaps.
If they must put large signs in the street advertising the new Sony Ericsson with the 3.2 megapixel camera, what am I going to do about it?
Quite.
So here are some of the pictures I took. For a camera, it’s a bloody cool phone.
I really like living in the future.
July 24, 2006 at 12:16 pm
Nice photos there, were they taken around bristol or elsewhere.
You do seem to like the contre jour effect in your pictures.
July 24, 2006 at 12:30 pm
In a rather febrile wooded valley in Gloucestershire. It was very humid.
What does contre jour mean? Against daylight? Into the sun?
I know I go for the cheap compositional effects, but it is nice to have a camera where I am finally making progress with the images that I am producing. I’d got to the limits of my last one, and I suspect that I might get to the limits of this one fairly soon.
This lot was just playing around with what I’ve found, but I finally feel that I can imagine an image and then go out and find a way to produce it.
Thanks for commenting Phil.
AB
July 24, 2006 at 2:20 pm
Wonderful photos, AB.
First one - very asmospheric, with those shafts of light coming through the trees.
Second one - am still trying to analyse exactly why I find that so interesting. Something to do with shapes and patterns. Who’d've thought barbed wire could make a design statement.
Third one - liked best. The ways those umbrels are silhouetted against both light and shade - and the details on the florets and the hairs on the stem.
I played around with my digital camera on holiday - using the night-time setting for the first time - but didn’t really get anything that pleased me much.
Did take a series of silly ones - with family posing in a niche beside the pool. Amusing, if you know the people concerned - but not art.
July 24, 2006 at 3:36 pm
Contre jour as you guessed, is against the day, a posh way of saying shooting into the light. You seem to work well with it and it can produce some interesting effects, some intended (such as the halo around the flower in the third shot) or some unintended (lens flare from internal reflections in the lens/camera).
July 24, 2006 at 4:27 pm
I really, really, really like the barbed wire one, though I have no idea why. It just looks great.
July 24, 2006 at 5:45 pm
I, too, really really liked the barbed wire one. And the misty Tolkienesque wood is charming. And I always like interesting plant portraits. But the fence-post and barbed wire somehow does it for me.
Cool phone, huh?
July 24, 2006 at 6:29 pm
I too really really like the fence post.
I think I was very lucky with the angle of the light, because some strands are dark with shadow, and some are bright with light, and I think that 15 minutes earlier or later they’d have either all had the light in front of them or all had the light behind them.
It’s nice to have a camera that focuses on things too. I love the fact that you can see the spider’s web.
Thank you all for commenting. I’m glad you like the pics.
AB
July 25, 2006 at 6:11 am
I loved the forest! I can’t believe you took those with a camera phone. My camera phone absolutely sucks, but I’m no photographer, so no reason to update to one as good as this. Lucky you!
September 15, 2006 at 12:06 am
[...] Bloglily’s recent post in praise of sloth has made me re-examine what happened to me the day I bought my new phone. I’d got the day of an event wrong, and ended up with some completely unscheduled time. [...]