Lazy Robot

Crikey , a photo by craigand on Flickr. iPhone photos ahoy! Another one! This time just because the light was so amazingly perfect that I had to take a picture of *something*. I wanted to see how the iPhone camera would handle the branches and tiny twigs with this type of light on them. Turns out, pretty darn well. Almost but not quite as well as, I would say, a 2002 era APS-C digital sensor. Which is damned impressive, considering that the entire camera is a 6mm cube that fits inside a mobile phone. 100% crop of the twig detail It's very noisy though. 100% crop shows just how noisy this sensor is, even being back-lit and shooting at ISO 50. It's the sort of noise level that, given the good light, I would expect to see at about ISO 400 on an older sensor, and ISO 1600 on a modern APS-C SLR. 100% crop of the noisy sky

Keep off the track , a photo by craigand on Flickr. I've been playing with a new iOS camera app (yes, another one) called ThirtySix. It's a strange thing; you can only take black and white pictures, and you have to use up a whole virtual "roll" of 36 exposures before you can see any of them. The processing done is a basic high contrast b&w and is applied automatically with no option to change it. The idea is to make iOS photographers thoughtful about their photographs. No "keep shooting until you get the right one", no "shoot 100 and pick the best", no "fix a crap photo with Instagram filters". There is no exposure to worry about, no colour, only the light and the framing. Slow down, frame, consider, reframe, add light? move? duck? climb? and finally shoot. Of course you have your "gut feel" for when something didn't quite work out so you can reshoot, but you won't find out until (potentially much) later. It'...

The weather isn't really improving a great deal. It's not thick snow, but it comes in fits and starts and the rain and cold is pretty much constant. Still, heading out for a walk can clear the brain and keep one fit. Last weekend we went to Colemere in Shropshire and very nice it was too. The view across Colemere Bare trees by Colemere Reflections Snowdrops, but thankfully no snow Mossy stump Ripples on the water Reflections in the mist Trees by the canal On the bridge Broken wood Have a gander Warts and all Bridge 54 Graffitree How the mighty have fallen By the roots SUC

Last week I took delivery of a set of ND filters, 3 plain and 3 graduated, so I thought I'd go out one evening and have a play with them. Here are the results of my first attempts. One things I did notice is that the filters add a slight-to-medium magenta cast to the images. More noticeable when the filters are stacked, but still there even when using a low value filter. I guess the solution is to always use a 0.3 plain ND behind the graduated filter so that the whole image gets a magenta cast, then use a greycard to set the white balance to counteract it. For these, though, it was enough to selectively apply a fix in Aperture to remove the colour cast, then a reasonable amount of dodging and burning to bring out foreground features that got caught up in the ND filter and overly darkened. Overall, I'm happy that I can make the best of these and get some more pop out of the skies in my landscape photographs. Note that the colours are genuine, once the co...

Sunset over Grenoside , a photo by craigand on Flickr.

It snowed. We went for a walk. These are some photos .

Snowy water feature , a photo by craigand on Flickr. The electric water feature in the garden, frozen and covered in snow.