Archiving my Twitter, Facebook and other social network activity
@salmon_cannon Thank you on both counts!
And yeah, I’ve been really impressed with the Pixel 2 camera. Not just the daylight photos, but it does surprisingly well with night shots too. And it’s fast enough that the burst & motion modes don’t seem to sacrifice much.
I keep meaning to look for an alternate camera app that will let me do long exposures.
@kemonine I remember doing a bunch of experimenting when the camera was new & settled on some best-for-most-cases settings. White balance is only available in some modes – it usually does a decent job on that, but I think it must have just detected the wrong type of light in this case.
Thanks for the tip on turning digital zoom off completely. I don’t use it very much, but figured it wouldn’t hurt to have available for when I do. Maybe it is?
I guess I should do a new round of experiments with this camera & see what I can convince it to do!
Yeah, I rarely have reason to use the digital zoom with that lens!
I used to figure if I needed to zoom past what the optics can do, I’d just crop it smaller. In most cases it’s still better than screen resolution anyway. But I’ve found that digital zoom has one advantage over cropping after the fact: the camera bases any automatic settings like exposure on the actual image you intend to take, not the wider view.
But yeah, might as well turn it off the rest of the time.
Pixel 2 vs. PowerShot SX710HS.
I’m only a hobbyist photographer. I don’t have a really nice camera, just a point & shoot that I picked mainly for its optical zoom. And I’m still astonished that I can often get better pictures out of the tiny lens on my phone.
This is from #WonderCon over the weekend, my wife’s #cosplay as Whitney Frost from Agent Carter. The phone picture is so much sharper, and the Pixel 2 finally gets the color balance better too.
Album: https://www.flickr.com/photos/kelsonv/albums/72157694829944955
Nighttime fountain at the Anaheim Convention Center. This was a popular spot for cosplay photos even after sunset, but I managed to catch an angle that looked deserted.
#wondercon #photography #fountain #night
My full gallery of photos from WonderCon is up on Flickr. Most of them are just cosplay snapshots. This ended up being the only artistic shot I took that came out really well.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kelsonv/albums/72157694829944955
Birds of Madrona Marsh in Torrance, California.
It’s a seasonal marsh, where the low-lying parts stay wet most of the year, but the rest dries out ever summer and floods during winter rains.
I spotted ducks, doves, geese, these black birds with bright red wings that sound like a smoke detector battery alert, this white bird that looked like it was fishing, plus dragonflies, a huge bee, and I heard (but didn’t see) frogs.
Full album (21 pics) on Flickr
Actually the croaking frogs might have been quacking ducks in the distance, now that I think about it.
I think the white bird might be a snowy egret, and that red-winged black bird turns out to be… a red-winged blackbird. 😄
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowy_egret
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red-winged_blackbird
Photo taken at: Los Angeles, California
Rising above the clouds… I tried a lot of crops on this (otherwise it’s unmodified) but finally settled on the square because I wanted enough of both the rooftops and the sky bracketing the clouds and mountain, and I wanted to steer clear of some of the foreground buildings that would have appeared on the sides and break up the layout.
Indian hawthorn flowers in bloom, spotted on my lunch hour walk. It’s been a warm winter in California, and we’ve finally gotten some rain over the last few weeks (not enough, but some is better than none).
Light dusting of snow in the mountains above Los Angeles after last night’s rain.
We need more… #mountains #sangabriels #losangeles
Testing out the new phones camera on a bee. It has an option to add a second or so of video to still shots when it detects movement, which I figured I’d try out as well.
Looking back through my oldest Instagram photos, I’m struck by just how awful phone cameras used to be.
I mean, yeah, I remembered flip phone cameras were terrible, but even early smartphones couldn’t handle situations we expect them to now. Got to remember filters were introduced to compensate for the grain, gloom & fuzz.
Thought I had a great view of these stalks and dried-out flowers at a seasonal marsh, but the lens flare…
The actual good photos from my hike are on Flickr, if you’re interested
Naturally-screened city.
In the distance: buildings along Los Angeles’ Wilshire Blvd as seen from the hills of Kenneth Hahn Park, an island of open space in the middle of the suburban sprawl.
Two views of a rainbow during a rainstorm a few days ago (first of the season for southern California).
The hour grows late, and Los Angeles rises out of the palm trees, preparing for another night. 😉
Seriously, though, I was trying out different settings on a camera with a good zoom lens.
In response to KemoNine asking about the haze:
By LA standards, for 11 miles away, that’s crystal clear!
We’ve actually had some really clear days over the last month or so, especially after the winds have blown all the smog out to sea (before they bring all the dust out from the desert a day or two later), interspersed with smoggy days and days when the sky is full of smoke from wildfires in the mountains or canyons. The smoke from the massive fire raging in Ventura is mostly being blown the other way from here.
It’s a lot better than it used to be 20 years ago. A couple of years back on a visit to my parents’, I noticed that I could see the mountains from their front door. I had never noticed that the whole time I was growing up there!
And even that was better than their stories of LA smog in the 60s: outdoor school activities cancelled due to smog, being unable to see the end of a block, observing sunspots directly…
Air quality laws have made a huge difference!
Disinterested Seagull: “What, there’s a sunset behind me? Nah, can’t make me look!”
Last Sunday, after a hectic afternoon running errands through Christmas shopping crowds, I went out to the Manhattan Beach Pier to watch the waves and relax. This seagull seemed to have the “relax” part down already.
