Photos of the Day, January 28, 2013

Time to get posting again.  Over the weekend I did some  major site work, and from what I’ve seen, I’m very happy with the changes.  I moved my entire site, including two wordpress applications and the slideshow database and it all works.

So now I’ll go back in time and post a bunch of things I’ve wanted to put into their proper order, but in the meantime, some shots from today.

In posting these, I’m putting up my very first unadulterated or “processed” images from my new I phone 5.  Basically, the primary reason I went with this phone was the camera feature, which although fully automatic, seemed to me to take the best images from the comparison tests that I’ve seen.

While I’ve had the phone for several weeks, I’ve only taken about 100 images or so, primarily because I’d test this feature or that, not really happy with some of the results.  Today however, I figured out how to work with the auto exposure to try and manipulate the image to compensate for too much light or too little light.

This was the first shot that I took as a snow squall started moving into my field of view and headed north along the mountain. I was quite happy with the display of the light and the way the sunlight filtered through the snow, but in this image the camera didn’t expose for what my eye was able to see and appreciate.

But that’s common, since no camera sensor has the range of the human eye.  Generally we have to make some kind of exposure compensation when there are such extremes in light and dark, and this was no exception.

But this is an “automatic” camera,  how does one override the automatic exposure?  I knew from other cameras that I use from time to time that you can sometimes fool the exposure by holding down the focus button while you focus on the sky, and then point the camera back down to the ground.  The only problem here is that there is no exposure button, but is there?

While this next image has a the foreground a bit dark, the light and the snow are perfectly exposed for a representation of what I saw.  And here is the trick: With the Iphone you can touch the screen before you take the photo and have the image focus on a different part of the scene.  In this instance I touched the screen in about 5 different places in the clouds, along the parking lot, and in the center of the light.  Nothing worked as well as a certain point in the sky, and the image turned out exactly as I had hoped. 

As the storm moved north, the rays of light became more pronounced.  I have to confess, I love the view out of my windows, although at times I’d like to take a chainsaw to the light poles and the furniture store sign.

A good friend of mine once said that if possible, buy a house with a view of the mountains.  He said that during the day you always are looking at a different mountain as the day changes.  Here you can see, that on occasion, we have a display that is the best of theater.