Round Robin: Phone and Photo Phun!

For this week's  Round Robin Photo Challenge (RRPC2: Fun Fun Fun!), I mostly had in mind the fun I am going to have this weekend. By the time you read this, we will be driving to Disneyland! Perhaps we'll even have arrived by then, and will be having serious Disney-themed fun. I'll post pictures from Disneyland before Saturday is out, probably to Facebook and maybe to Tumblr. But in the meantime I'm having fun putting this post together on my newest toy: an iPhone!

My iPad II, called Ariel, and my new iPhone, "Blue Belle."

I'd been wanting to get an iPhone for over a year, but the desire grew especially intense as the Disneyland trip approached. I had apps on my iPad with maps of the Parks and wait times for the rides, but even if I were foolish enough to carry the iPad into Disneyland it wouldn't help much. It doesn't have a built-in wireless connection, so it wouldn't be online gathering data. But an iPhone is online, portable and versatile. My research showed that dumping the landline plus an Episcopal Church discount would save enough to just about cover the cost of me having an iPhone and John having my old Intensity II - John's first mobile phone ever. John said to go for it, so I did! I've been walking around with a big grin on my face for several days. Fun? You betcha!

My Canon Powershot has seen better days. 

One cool thing about this phone is that it has a fairly decent camera built in. It's certainly better than the one on my old phone, or even on my iPad II. To test this, I experimented with using these three devices to photograph each other. My three year old camera is a bit beat up from all the hard use and abuse I give it, and has dust inside that nobody is willing to clean for me. Plus, how do I transfer the photos while I'm in Anaheim without a computer? Photo uploads from an iPhone are a different story.

Blue Belle's photo of Ariel photographing the Powershot, which doesn't have a cutesy name.

As for the photos themselves, I'm not going to bother with the iPad ones. The resolution on the iPhone photos is visibly better. I was also pleased, and a little surprised, to discover that the iPhone has built-in flash, something my iPad definitely does not have.

Enough. Check out the various flavors of fun found and photographed by other Robins. I'll be back with photos of Disneyland fun, on one or more social media sites, before the weekend is over.

Karen

Linking List
prepared ahead of time because I'll be on the road

Karen - Posted!
Outpost Mâvarin
http://outmavarin.blogspot.com
http://www.facebook.com/mavarin
http://mavarin.tumblr.com/
@mavarin

Freda
Day One
http://fredamans.blogspot.ca

Jama
Sweet Memories
http://mummyjam.blogspot.com

Teri
Teri H Hoover Photography
http://terihoover-crystal-iris-images.blogspot.com/

Carly
Ellipsis
http://ellipsissuddenlycarly.blogspot.com


Tina
Tina´s PicStory
http://tinaspicstory.blogspot.de/2012/05/stuttgarter-fruhlingsfest.html

Dogs in Motion

When I broke in my new camera yesterday (a Canon PowerShot SX110 IS), naturally I started with photos of the dogs. The first shot isn't worth showing you. It was Cayenne in the kitchen, in motion. The problem with the picture is that I had not yet discovered that the flash on this camera has to be flipped up into position. So: no flash, lousy photo.

But from there on out I got quite a few good ones. Here is photo #2, sharpened once, but otherwise basically unedited. And here is a portrait of Pepper:

After that it was on to the dog park. It was well after 6 PM, but the light of sunset was sufficient for the Canon to get some fairly amazing action shots. Here are a few of them:

Pepper amazed me Friday and Saturday. After months of almost completely ignoring the dozens of tennis balls littering the dog park, Pepper went after one on Friday, and went on to chase one for me three times. She mostly didn't bring it back, but it was still a big step for Ms. Independent & Contrary. By Saturday evening she was even sorta-kinda bringing them back to me. Good Pepper!

Karen

Aye, and Sepia

Well, well, well. This is an interesting one. They all are, really, but this Round Robin Photo Challenge is a little different from most, because it focuses on photographic equipment rather than the subject matter or presentation. My buddy Becky of Where Life Takes You came up with the idea that we should stretch our photographic skills a bit, by trying out camera settings we've never used before. So that's exactly what we're going to do!

Multiburst

This first one I took the evening of the "big wheels" Monday Photo Shoot. It's the power plant, and the setting I was trying out was called "Multiburst." I thought it would be a series of regular size photos taken in rapid succession, but instead it was a block of tiny images. If something were moving we could see whether or not they're all the same shot. Hmm. Oh, Tuffy...!

Black and White, Natural, Vivid, Sepia

This is not a multiburst shot. I've ganged up four photos of the same scene from early this evening. These are all from the "Program Auto" setting on the dial, "Auto exposure with adjustable settings." Hitting the menu button from here gives the Color Mode options B&W, Sepia, Natural, Vivid and Normal. (I just discovered by accident that there's a series of icons at the bottom, for other sets of options.) Natural, Vivid and Normal don't seem all that different from each other. For these settings, I didn't edit for tone or saturation, since the point is to show what the camera did. But I did do a second edit of the B&W shot (not shown), boosting the contrast.

Programmed Color Mode: Sepia

Here's another sepia shot. I thought it might be interesting to give an old-timey look to the gas tanks and Mount Lemmon as seen from Alvernon Way near Irvington. Somehow it mostly ends up looking like a dust storm.

Soft Snap

This Tuffy shot is on the "Soft Snap" setting, described as "Shoot subject with soft background."

Twilight Portrait, edited

Somewhere in my Tuffy series I lost track of which settings I used in which shots, but I think this was on the Twilight Portrait dial setting, "Shoot portraits in low light with flash." Tuffy just heard a noise, probably John pulling into the driveway. I've cheated this one a bit, brightening it up and doing a "sharpen lightly."

Twilight Portrait, differently edited

I cheated on this one, too, using the autoenhance editing feature in PhotoStudio. This was probably Twilight Portrait also, but the extended info on these files isn't terribly helpful with such details.

Twilight Portrait, as is

This one is just as it came out of the camera, except for cropping and resizing.

Tuffy news: I finally spoke with Tuffy's regular vet, and brought her up to date on her condition and the options we were given. Dr. L. leans toward the palliative radiation, on the grounds that it's easier on Tuffy than removing more of her tongue at her age, and the couple of years this less expensive version of radiation therapy buys her should bring her close to her life expectancy anyway. John and I were both horrified with the whole learning-to-eat-again thing, and this does seem better for Tuffy's quality of life, especially in combination with the pills that help to slow the disease. I just hope we will be sensitive to when the time comes to let her go; I think we waited too long with Noodle. But that time for Tuffy is not yet.

Thanks, Becky, for making me explore my camera a little. Now I want to cycle through the rest of the icons on the P for Program setting.

Be sure to visit all our brave experimenters! And yes, you're invited to join in yourself! See the Round Robin blog for details.

Karen


Linking List

Becky - Posted!
Where Life Takes You
http://ryanagi.blogspot.com

Karen - Posted!
Outpost Mâvarin
http://outmavarin.blogspot.com

Janet
fond of photography
http://fondofphotography.blogspot.com

Nancy - Posted!
Nancy Luvs Pix
http://journals.aol.com/nhd106/Nancyluvspix

Vicki - Posted!
Maraca
http://mymaracas.blogspot.com/

Suzanne R - Posted!
New Suzanne R's Life
http://newsuzannerslife.blogspot.com

Steven - Posted!
(sometimes)photoblog
http://sepintx.blogspot.com/

Carly - Posted!
Ellipsis
http://ellipsissuddenlycarly.blogspot.com

P.S. Because I promised to keep up a daily posting of my fictional progress:

Kate was gone when I got up this morning. Ariel apparently came for her. Ariel left behind a note, something about partying with Molière and losing track of the time. Either Ariel got into my email and is teasing me, or she visited the world of Jace and Sandy, or both. I'll have to ask her sometime. Meanwhile, I hope to have a new fiction entry up on Messages before the weekend is out. I just don't know what it will be yet! - KFB

New Camera: Day 2

I've had a total of eight hours of sleep over the last two nights combined, so I'm going to rush this entry and go to bed. I wanted to get my next installment of the Princess and Commander Masan scene written and posted over on Messages from Mâvarin, but that's going to have to wait. Friday is probably a better night to schedule that, when I can stay up all night and sleep into the afternoon the next day.

As I mentioned last night, one of the main criteria I used in selecting my new camera (a Sony Cyber-shot) was its purported ability to take decent photos in relatively low-light conditions. Tonight I put the camera to the test in this respect. It didn't work any miracles, but overall I think it did rather well.


This first shot was taken at lunchtime, of chicken tortilla soup. It's a flash shot using the macro setting.


Dusk in the Unnamed Largish Company parking lot. The flash photos came out better than the low-light settings I tried. I played with the tone and saturation levels on this, but I almost always do that anyway.


One of the big frustrations I've had with past cameras is the difficulty in taking a good picture of Tuffy after dusk. The house is never brightly lit, for various reasons (older house, broken fixtures, sixty-watt bulbs), and when I use flash, her eyes get that awful shiny reflection that ruins the shot. Sometimes I color them brown afterward; this makes the shots barely usable. Since I pretty much only see Tuffy nights and weekends, I miss out on a lot of potential dog-blogging.

Can the Sony Cyber-shot help me with this problem? Well, a little bit. This was taken without flash by the light of a nearby sixty-watt bulb under a vintage lampshade. I've adjusted the levels quite a bit, but the colors are still off, it's still a bit dark and the focus is just so-so. Still, it's a nice mood piece, and I like the fuzziness of the background.


Okay, I played with this one quite a bit - for tone and saturation, despeckling and cropping - but even the raw version of the photo was rather striking. I love the shadow the dragon is casting here. This shot simply would not be possible with flash.


You may recognize these props from Halloween, and from one of the "mess" pictures from the Monday Photo Shoot. I have them stored in a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory popcorn bucket. I've tried many times to photograph this faux skull, but it always comes out looking very odd when I use flash. This is the best representation of the way the thing actually looks that I've managed to date.

1:14 AM. I've done worse. Good night!