HDR Camera, Part II

I've gone HDR Camera crazy!

This app has now made the Droid X my preferred camera for landscapes, easily beating my Canon PowerShot SD940 IS. The Canon has a spotmeter, which is a huge advantage in any camera. But for landscapes, where 95% of the time the sky is at least two stops brighter than the land, HDR Camera wins every time.




The disadvantages of this app are:
1) you take four photos, slowly, to produce one picture;
2) it takes a while for the app to load;
3) you are shooting through a phone's camera lens, meaning it's slow and tiny with no zoom.

The advantages are:
1) awesomeness!



You can even take portraits with it, but you need to advise your subject(s) to hold still as if they are being daguerreotyped circa 1849.


Otherwise you end up with grotesqueries such as this:

HDR Camera

The camera on my Droid X is pretty good: it's an impressive 8 megapixels (which seems better than, for instance, the iPhone's 5MP, until you come to understand the Myth of Megapixels), but more than that, the pictures turn out quite nice. They're sharp, with good color, etc. More than acceptable for a phone camera.

But recently the camera stopped working. Actually, the default camera app stopped working. Retro Camera still worked. So while I was trying to figure out how to fix it, I downloaded HDR Camera, a free (but ad-supported) replacement for the standard camera app. It doesn't apply funky filters like Retro Camera and its ilk. However, it does do HDR (high dynamic range) photography. I've been interested in HDR ever since I discovered what it was and saw the pictures.

Basically, HDR takes three or more shots of the same scene at different exposures, and uses the best bits of each. So rather than having a well-exposed Elizabeth against a bleach-white sky and next to a dark blot of tree-shadow, the sky is dark blue, Elizabeth is still well-exposed, and the dark blot is revealed to be rich green grass under the tree. Nothing is burnt-out, nothing is under-exposed.

HDR in the hands of a really good photographer, with professional grade hard- and software, produces some pretty startling effects:


So I tried HDR Camera for the first time today and it works very, very well. With "real" HDR, the camera needs to be on a tripod so all three or four pictures line up exactly, and can be blended together. Somehow, HDR Camera gets around this. It takes four pictures and somehow calculates better exposure ranges for different parts of the pictures.

I've only used it twice, but it worked well both times, even though my handheld phone/cam was moving around quite a bit. Obviously, it's not going to deliver the goods like professional equipment and software would, but it's exciting that it can provide any HDR effect at all.

The first picture, below, is with the regular camera app, the second is with HDR Camera:

I was excited enough about the results to buy the "pro" (i.e., ad-free) app for $0.99 on the very first day I used this app. It's only the second Android app I've ever paid for.

Video Solution

Last weekend I finally (with Barb's help) figured out how to shrink the widescreen videos my phone takes to fit in the rather narrow Blogger panel.

After uploading to YouTube, you change the dimensions of the video in the embed HTML code. I learned of this dead-simple solution through a Google search, naturally. Barb was enlisted to do the math necessary to maintain the correct aspect ratio.

The big winner here is Elizabethtown, where I post the majority of my phone videos.

Plus, it's always nice to solve one of life's many niggling little problems -- and this relieves one of the disappointments of the Droid X.

So, cool.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.5

Children's Book WTF

Although I don't read as much as I did before Elizabeth was born, I now read a lot of children's books. This heretofore unexplored realm of literature is full of awesomeness: there are many beautiful, clever, fun, wonderful things going on in children's books.

There is also the occasional (and delightful) discovery that makes me think, "What the hell?"

Example the first: we've got this nice, older book called I Like the Country. It tells the story of a year on a farm in prose and song.


The simple farmer milks the cows. His playful, hardy children feed the chickens and pick apples and roam the fields with their faithful dog. His handsome wife tends a vegetable garden. In the spring they plant, in the fall they harvest, in the winter they cut wood.


It's a really good book.

And it gets even better at the end of the book when the simple farmer gets into his airplane and takes off for the city to buy groceries.


Either the author was hopelessly out of touch with the fortunes of mid-century farm families, or I am. If the latter is true, and it was indeed common for family farmers to hop into their closed-cockpit plane for a milk run to the nearest metropolis, I can only ask what the hell went wrong. If Farmer Bob in 1962 can have a plane like that, I should be flying around with a jet-pack right now.

Retro Camera

For three months I resisted Retro Camera, despite the fact that it was named on almost every list of must-have applications for my Android phone. It's free, so there was no compelling reason not to get it. It just sounded dumb: an app that would make the pictures from your phone's camera look like an old Polaroid picture, or the product of some other, well, retro camera.

Then, in a moment of boredom I downloaded it, tried it, and understood it. It's pretty much awesome. It essentially offers five filters for your phone cam that can, under the right circumstances, transform a lame, limping image into one that runs, sprints, flies!

It adds a few more tools to allow the mediocre-at-best phone camera to meet the expectations of your imagination (if you are the kind of person that attempts art photography no matter what kind of camera is in hand, as I am.)

The one that I like best and use most is called the Fudge Cam, a Kodak Box Brownie clone, presumably. It helped me take the picture of Elizabeth's trike. The other retro cameras (a pinhole camera, the aforementioned Polaroid, etc.) are more gimmicky, less useful -- at least to me. I'm sure some other photographer has figured out awesome things to do with them. Maybe in time I will, too.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.5.9

Mountain Light

Galen Rowell was a hero of my youth. He died in 2002. I learned about this tonight, when blogging on Elizabethtown. Kind of a shocker.

Rowell was awesome. He was primarily a photographer, but also a writer, and an "outdoorsman" -- a sort of generic term to encompass his various outdoor activities, but mainly he was a rock-climber. He said more than once that although he was known for his photographs, he spent 75% of his professional life writing, and 25% taking pictures.

He was a good writer. However, his pictures were incredible.

I got turned on to Rowell through his 1984 best-seller Mountain Light. I was very much into photography at the time and was duly amazed at what this guy could achieve with a Nikon FM2, a 28mm lens, and Kodachrome 25. This very evening I was showing Aaron HDR photos on Flickr. (He didn't know what HDR was, so I was trying to edify.) After learning of Galen Rowell's death, I reviewed some of his photos and realized that what he achieved with his brain, very basic camera, excellent film (and a neutral density filter) was comparable to what HDR is attempting to get now.

He and his wife Barbara died in a small plane crash. Guy was 62, so not a spring chicken, but he was a healthy bastard, one of those California types that made the type famous the world 'round. Point being, if the pilot hadn't crashed, he probably would have lived to 92, vigorously.

Rowell's best piece of advice to me, as a photographer, was: turn away from the sunset and photograph what it is illuminating.

My best advice to you, in two parts: 1) learn more about Galen Rowell; 2) avoid small aircraft.

Portland Signposts

Portland has got a very planned cityscape, which entails the creation and use of some pretty funky signs. I'll present more in the coming days (or weeks), but this one will do for starters.

Plus, this entire post, including the photo, are the product of my (disappointing; but that's a tale for a different post) Motorola Droid X.

Why couldn't there be a Motorola Droog?

Published with Blogger-droid v1.4.8

Updated: Typos edited out on the laptop.

The Smartphone Shortage Problem

You can't buy any of the latest generation of smartphones. Why is no one writing about this?

The HTC Incredible was introduced April 29, 2010. You still can't go into a store and buy one. Back ordered. Then comes the HTC Evo in early June. Can't buy one. Back ordered. Apple's iPhone 4 comes out June 24. Can I go into a store and buy one? No. Then in late June pre-orders for the Motorola Droid X are opened and within days Best Buy stops taking pre-orders because the first production run is sold out. Now after the handful that are shipped to Verizon stores on July 15 are sold, it, too, will be back ordered.

So the only "superphone" that one can currently buy is the Nexus One, which came out in January and is on the worst network in the country: T-Mobile. Wonderful.

But for certain reasons I'm feeling pretty desperate to get a family plan and get Mom and Barb and myself cell phones. And of course, because I am a technogeek and can afford it, I want a superphone. So I decide, "Fuck it, I'll get a last-generation smartphone -- the still-pretty-cool Motorola Droid." Got to Verizon's website, add the Droid to my cart, add a free phone to the cart for Barb, then go to find the bare-bones and perfect-for-honored-citizens Samsung Knack for Mom and guess what? The goddamn Knack, the most basic phone in existence, is currently sold out.

What is the deal? Is this a business strategy to keep people in a froth about the latest and greatest? Is it a sign that industry is pushing the boundaries of the technosphere so hard that the infrastructure of manufacturing is breaking down? Or are these companies so dumb that they time after time underestimate the demand for these very expensive products in this depressed economy?