Author Archives: momdude

The iPhone giveth and the iPhone taketh away!

With an older smart phone there wasn’t as much logic in the phone, not as much computational wizardry on call with every photo, so if, for example, you took a picture of Christmas lights at night and moved the phone during a longer exposure of several seconds, you could get some interesting light trails. If you wanted nice, pinpoint lights with perfect Normal Rockwell focus, you needed a tripod or a miracle.

Now, with the camera smarter than you are, if you wiggle during that five or ten second low light photograph, the camera will turn it into dozens of much shorter, sharper, in-focus pictures and then align the bits and integrate and stack it all, giving you pinpoint lights.

But if you should WANT to get blurs and trails and foggy focus and something that might be more fun, more different, more froo froo, more artsy fartsy? That’s a problem, since you’re not in control any more and you can’t override most of those settings. So it might take a dozen or two photos before you get anything like the effect you want.

It occurs to me that, while I love and use the crap out of my iPhone 13 Pro Max and am yet disappointed with this facet of its design, I do still have my iPhone 8 and my iPhone 6 which may not have SIM cards to turn them back into phones, but they’re still perfectly functional as cameras. Most importantly, stupider cameras. It might be necessary to pull them out and charge them up for some ‘sperimentin!

In addition, while the world may be moving toward little bots and devices with “FULL AUTO MODE!” everything, the DSLR world, while containing modes in which the smart camera does most of the work, still has “off” switches for almost every one of those modes. More ‘sperimentin!

For tonight, enjoy a couple of quick shots of the lights on the rose bushes next to the driveway.

Another busy day with the lights – probably at about 80% to 90% of what I would like to do at this point.

I’ve got three places where I would like to get a set of lights up, and another two or three spots where I can add another set to fill in, if I can find working sets of lights.

We’ll see. At this point part of the problem is that a lot of the light sets I have are years and years old and they’re starting to fail, with 1/3 or 2/3 or 1/4 of the sets being out. I won’t put those up, but I can’t quite figure out how to repair them, either.

There are little gizmos out there that are supposed to help you identify where in a light set it’s broken so that you can repair that part – I’ve never been able to get them to work. For now, if I can get a couple of sets, great. If not, well, at a certain point, good enough is good enough. We’ll see what tomorrow brings. It’s already better than I did last year, so a couple more quick sets and I’ll be fine if that’s all we get done this year.

Outside.

Then we have the inside decorations and the tree.

And the cards.

I do love the holiday traditions!

The Younger Daughter was nice enough to come over today, as she is wont to do on the Friday after Thanksgiving, to help with the first round of Christmas lights and we got a lot done.

We got probably half of them up – still need the lights over the garage, the icicle lights along the gutters, the lights along the driveway and in the rose bushes, the lights at the end of the house in the hibiscus bushes.

But, as always, a lot of the first day is also spent running extension cords and setting up timers, so all in all it was an excellent day.

And, as always, it was way too much lifting, twisting, carrying, climbing of ladders, and so on, so my stumpy, slightly chubby, desk-ridden, sendentary body is twitching and cramping tonight. Ah, the things we do for our art!