Phoning It In

"Sunflowered"

I was running super late for the train this morning, and showed up in the Caltrain parking lot only to discover I'd managed to pack every part of my camera bag except my camera. Moral: I'm not cut out for commuting before 8am, and maybe not even tasks involving fine motor skills. ;)

Anyway, I decided I would stick it out with my iPhone, because I was interested in seeing how well I would do with the thing, considering most of the time I have my SLR with me. I've got one of the iPhone 4s, which has a number of things going for it:

"The Fighter"

•  Comparatively fast "shutter" actuation (for a Phone, at least)
• Spot metering by touching on the screen (as of iPhone 3, at least)
• Decent resolution (I think 5MP), and
• Decent ISO (well, for a phone -- a bit P&S like, so still generally shitty)
• The new "HDR" feature (which is really the Exposure Fusion algorithm -- generally more sane than the comic book feel of out of the box HDR)

"First!"

Now, I know you can use a cell phone to take some great images. It's just that inevitably, the really good ones I see tend to be abstracts or landscapes -- it's just pretty hard to use one for the photography I like best, which is live and out on the street. I was kind of interested to see what kind of images I could get on the train ride up and on our lunch break in the city.

I wasn't unhappy with my time using the iPhone (and was even happy with a few of the images), but there were times when I felt myself constrained -- not fast enough, not enough range, too noisy, too cooked, blah blah blah. I do believe that basically anything that can take photographs can produce an amazing image, but after a day of trying to use the phone to capture pedestrians in fleeting moments and fleeting light, I can't say I'm ready to put down my d700 yet.

"The Racer"

You can see some of my favorite images from today scattered around this blog -- bear with the clutter, since it seems making four images sanely arranged throughout a blogger post is trickier than it looks. ;)