Rubbishing Art

Harsh critique, eh?

(Photographed with the Samsung G800, with the contrast turned up a bit with PhotoImpact).

Orchids and Shoes - 1

I don’t know why I found it so satisfying when the young man put his newly polished shoes on the windowsill in front of the orchids.  I watched him clean them with spit and with polish.  A fascinating process, and you can just see how shiny it got them.  It photographed ok-ish.   The camera is more sensitive to light and dark than the human eye, so the curtains were much lighter and brighter than they show in the photograph.

Reducing and Cropping

The earlier mornings and later afternoons are a daily delight, and when you add sunshine it’s bliss.

Here’s today’s photograph, reduced to 25% of it’s original size:

And here is the mid-section of the photograph at full resolution, but cropped.

Not in Cuneiform any More

I’d forgotten that I’d photographed a whiteboard at work today until I downloaded my other photos off my phone this evening.

Since this is a record of what I see each day as much as it’s anything, I put it up here as today’s offering.

It’s not inherently interesting, but in the context of this blog I take comfort that so much early cuneiform is the deadly dull record-keeping of Assyrian and Babylonian civil servants.

Incidentally, the optical zoom on the G800 was useful for this because it allowed me to stand at the other end of the table and photograph the board straight on and still get the image to fill the frame.

Tulips up close and personal

The frustrating thing is that the Sony Ericsson has the better software controls (and I’ll miss them) but the Samsung is the better camera. These two photos were taken with everything except the flash and the focus turned to “auto”.

It’s not particularly bright in here (it’s my kitchen, it’s 7.00pm, it’s February) but both phones did pretty well.

Interestingly, the Sony Ericsson (below) is closer to what I see, but the Samsung (above) is the more pleasing image.

Talking of not very bright - why did I commit to a photo every day for four weeks when it’s still dark in the evenings? Oh well.

That Sinking Feeling

When the one I spend my weekends with and I saw the abandoned ferry, it was surrounded by water. I wanted to see it beached on the sand, so I went back at low(ish) tide today and took some more photographs, and I took the opportunity to compare the Samsung G800 with the Sony Ericsson K800i. I’m also putting up a Picassa album, it is past time I did so.

The image below was taken with the Sony Ericsson, and I’ve reduced it to 20% of it’s original size. It seems rather hazy, though in fairness the lens needed cleaning.

The image below is the same shot with the Samsung. I’d run out of memory on the phone and the original was half the maximum size the camera will handle. It’s been reduced to about 60% of its original size to match the other image.

Despite that, it does rather make the point though. I’ll do some more of these with clean lenses.

I’m usually very careful not to photograph other people’s children, but I could not resist this one which is 25% of the size of the original:

Back to the ferry: I thought the Sony Ericsson was giving me brighter colours at the time, but now I wonder if LCD screen on the Ericsson makes the colours appear brighter. I can adjust both LCD screens on both phones, so it’s pretty irrelevant really.

Once again, the Sony Ericsson appears hazy in comparison with the Samsung. Both images are reduced to 20% of the size of the original. The Sony Ericsson first:

And now the Samsung - I was wingeing yesterday that every single thing is in focus in Samsung-land but - hey - it can look really good like that:

The Samsung places brackets around the central section of the image when you look through the view finder which is distracting, and this is one of the few images I took this morning which doesn’t have the subject plonked in the middle of the picture.

I messed around with the zoom feature a bit as well today, but there are only so many photographs of the ferry that you or I can look at, gentle viewer, without our exasperation showing, so I’ll put up photos which demonstrate that feature another day.

The Ladybird Book of the Sea Shore

Here are today’s offerings from the G800. As with yesterday’s photo, I think the colours are a bit washed out. On the other hand, this is England, this is February, colours are washed out.

We were going to Cleveleys for another reason entirely, and drove past the grounded ferry. For some reason a fire engine decided to drive along the promenade just as we arrived:

The ferry was the perfect opportunity to try out the optical and digital zoom on the camera:

The photo above is “au naturel” and the photo below has the 3x optical zoom:

This is the first time I’ve had a camera with a zoom lens, and I rather like it.  There’s also a digital zoom which I’ll play with another day.

There were buses and vans there too, for some reason to do with tram repairs:

Unfortunately I couldn’t get the true ladybird shot, of the ferry, the fire engine, the bus, the van, a tram, a car and a plane.

There was one image which pleased me as an image rather than a camera test:

As before, these are as they came off the camera, but reduced to 20% of their original size.

Twilit satanic mills

I’m slightly disappointed with the G800 on two counts - firstly the PC software has not been glitch-free. There’s good retro, and bad retro, and problems installing software and random errors and re-launches are bad retro. Secondly it doesn’t seem to be possible to control the focal length: everything seems to be in focus, and I’m not sure that’s what I want. I don’t feel I’m being unreasonable: the Ericsson gave me more control than I expected with that. I’m going to make a point of exploring that more.

In the meantime here’s today’s picture (grabbed in haste on my way home this evening) of a 1960s tower block bracketed by some refurbished mill buildings. There’s a whole recursive spiral of irony in here if you feel that way inclined, but that’s not what this blog is about and I think it’s rather a dull picture.

The good news is the phone coped with the approaching twilight, the bad news the phone failed to capture what luminosity there was, it’s washed out some of the contrast and some of the quality of the light. It’s not a photograph I’d normally post here. I feel it’s a competently composed image let down by being taken on the hoof, a point confirmed by the fact that I’m rather taken with the version below where it masquerades as etching, which is something I achieved accidentally while trying it out as a black and white image in PhotoImpact to see if it worked better like that.

Photo-synthesis

I’ve just got myself a Samsung G800 which is a 5 megapixel camera with a phone thrown in for good measure. While I was NaBloPoMo-ing I found blogs which offer a photo a day for a year. I’m not up for that, but I’d going to try offering a photo a day for four weeks while I get to know my new phone. I’m not going to commit to posting daily, but I am going to commit to photographing daily.

Here’s the first one, reduced to 20% of it’s original size and rotated anti-clockwise by 1 degree.

This was a matter of point and shoot, though you can see that I had the flash as well as the natural light. On the camera, the photograph looks rather dull, but it works on the screen. I doubt it’s as pleasing when printed though.

Andy and the Masons

A building I go to regularly has set after set of photos of the local great and good of the 1940s, 50s, 60s and 70s hung on its walls in room after room. They are oddly disturbing photographs. I am sure that individually they were perfectly normal men for their times, but collectively they look decidedly creepy, as if every member of the Manhattan Project had been photographed all at once. It may be all those tie pins and brylcreme. I’m not sure.

I’ve wanted to Warhol them ever since I first saw them. I finally got a photograph with little enough reflection in it to have a go, though it’s intriguing how persistent the reflections on the left are. I’m not entirely happy with this for lots of reasons, not least because its harder than it looks to balance bright splashes of colour in a space. He knew a thing or two, did Andy Warhol.

Anyway, here they are.