A Year in Pictures – Etched Window

[swan_tower]

This work by http://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

If I needed evidence that proper cameras still have the edge over cameraphones, this provides it. I tried to take a photo of this window (in the Okinawan Prefectural Budokan) with my phone, and it came out useless, with the etching totally washed out. When I came back the next day with my actual camera, though, I could control the settings enough that it came out beautifully.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

Lovely! Are they irises?

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Looks like it to me -- but I'm not very good at identifying plants, so.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

That is quite lovely.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[ckd]

Yeah. I think cameras have passed the 80/20 tipping point, though; phone cameras are good enough 80% of the time, turning real cameras into something of a novelty. This is more obvious at the low end of the point-and-shoot market; DSLRs will probably always have more than enough to do.

(I haven't bought a P&S digicam in a long time, and my 2-year-old phone camera is still better in several ways than the first two or three of them I ever bought....)

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Yes, I don't think DSLRs are going away. If you're serious about photography, there's no substitute. The lower-end point-and-shoot market is definitely vanishing, though.

The thing that bugs me is, a phone is hard to hold steady. I feel like my phone pictures are much more liable to come out blurry because I have to hold the thing in my fingertips, rather than gripping it properly.

[ckd]

Apple seems to agree with you (as do I), since they added optical image stabilization to the iPhone 6+.

[dhampyresa.livejournal.com]

This is beautiful! And the lack of adjustable setiings on camera phones is a big problem.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I feel like it ought to be possible to design an app that will give you more control -- or maybe it exists already. That still wouldn't solve the blurriness problem I mentioned above, though.

[findabair.livejournal.com]

Gosh, that's beautiful! I love how you caught the texture of the clouds behind the window.

I tend to view phone photography as its own genre which should be judged according to its own merits and not as something intended to replace 'regular' photography. I have been shooting and editing with my phone daily for a few years now, and find it both interesting and a lot of fun, but as you mention, there certainly are situations where I can't do without a 'proper' camera (which tends to be film rather than digital these days, but that's a different story).

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the image wouldn't be nearly as interesting if the sky behind had been entirely clear or flat cloudy.

As for phone photography being its own thing, I guess it depends on what you consider "regular" photography to be. For a lot of the populace, it is a replacement for all the photography they would ever have done.

[findabair.livejournal.com]

Is it a replacement or an addition? Seems to me a lot more people take photos now that phone cameras have gotten so good. On the other hand I would certainly argue that people who are serious about photography can't limit themselves to mobile.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Is it a replacement or an addition? Seems to me a lot more people take photos now that phone cameras have gotten so good.

No argument that more people are taking photos, but I would say it's definitely a replacement, because they aren't also carrying around dedicated cameras. I'm looking at the mode of photography, not the images: they haven't stopped taking photos of X and replaced them with photos of Y, but the equipment has been swapped out rather than expanded.

[davidgoldfarb.livejournal.com]

That's really lovely. I've liked nearly all of your "year in pictures" but this one may well be my favorite.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Delighted to hear it!