And puffy clouds!
Our AN-2 on the left, C-46 on the right.
It was still raining at home, 35 miles away, and the big storm is moving in tonight through late Monday.
Difference in pictures is the normal iPhone 13 lens on the top, the wide angle lens (and about ten steps forward) on the bottom.
Filed under CAF, Photography, Weather
Permutations. Combinations. Still playing around to see what happens.
The front edge of that desperately needed rainstorm is coming off the coast tonight for a couple days of drizzle and we hope a couple of actual bouts of rain over the next few days. I was checking out the fog and clouds rolling in and decided to combine a few settings on the new iPhone.
Panorama. 16:9 instead of 4:3. Wide angle lens.
It’s a lot more bowed, distorted, and fisheyed than I expected. (I didn’t do the whole 360º thing, cut it off early simply because I wasn’t trying to show our front door and roof, wanted to see the sky.) It almost looks like I’m standing on a corner, but all of those lines on the sidewalks and streets and power lines are straight. (Well, straight-ish. Close enough.) You’ve seen enough pictures of that view.
I’m sure that there might be times when I want to use those settings to deliberately get this effect – but this view might not be the time or place.
The “normal” panorama looks much better. Thinner. Those power lines are still bowed upward like the whole planet just went into freefall, but the warping of the street and the foreshortening of the cars is much less jarring visually.
Bring on the rain! Please?
Filed under Panorama, Photography, Sunsets
They’re back, as I had hoped for!
Last October we started seeing a dozen or so of these cute, funny little birds in our back yards, the black-headed juncos. Then in April, they vanished, being migratory – except for Solo Junco, who stayed through the summer. (I mean, going to Canada for sex is great, but so is eating steady all year round, I guess?)
Looking back, it was October when they showed up last year, so I was on the lookout. Late last week I saw three of them. A couple days ago I saw nine or ten. They hop around and scatter and flit and fly all over the yard, so sometimes they’re hard to get an exact count on, and also it makes it tough to get a group photo. But thanks to the new supercomputer & high-end camera that I carry in my pocket, this afternoon I caught at least five in a single picture, out of the eight or nine that were there at the time.
Click to enlarge – can you spot the five juncos? Don’t be fooled, there are seven birds shown. Two are members of the flock of house finches that we have here year around.
The five juncos are circled in red, the two finches in green. Also not shown (off to the side) are the mourning doves, California towhees, and squirrel. Not to mention the lizards (which, to be honest, are mostly starting to hibernate for the winter.)
Filed under Birds, Critters, Photography
(There’s a theme here the last few days. Yeah, back in “Deadline Days” and there’s not a lot of time, so as I do my “walk around the back yard for two minutes because my watch is yelling at me to step away from the desk” breaks, I’m playing with the new iPhone to see what it can do on the fly with zero prep or planning.)
I’ve heard so many good things about the iPhone 13 macro (close-up) lens – oooh, look, those flowers are blooming again!
Not bad! The camera is probably 1/2 inch or so away from the flower. How close can I get? A bee’s eye view?
Um, okay, that’s pretty amazing. Add to the list to try and play more with this with an actual tripod and planning…
I’m really liking this phone/camera, a lot!
Filed under Flowers, Photography
a.k.a., “What Does THIS Button Do?”
So the iPhone 13 will do a nice job on sunsets. This does not surprise me a bit.
Zooming in a bit, the silhouette of the tree against those orange and peach colored clouds is extremely wonderful. It’s got a true optical 3x telephoto lens in addition to the normal lens and a wide angle lens, all available at the touch of a button.
Buttons, buttons. What’s this one? It’s new…
Oh, my! There’s a whole little submenu that pops up. I can manually control effects, exposure, flash… And image size? So these are 4:3 images, 4032 x 3024 pixels… What does 16:9 get me?
Wonderful! Compare to the first photo, both at “normal” 1x zoom levels. This is shorter & wider, 4032 x 2268 pixels, actually a few fewer than the 4:3, which surprises me, but I love the widescreen aspect ratio!
What happens if I go to the wide angle lens at a 16:9 aspect ration?
That’s a thing of beauty.
Next time I get a great sunset like this I want to remember to also grab the Canon DSLR with that amazing wide angle light bucket monster of a lens and get some side-by-side comparison images. Should be interesting, to say the least.
Filed under Photography, Sunsets
Yesterday’s awful lot of blue did eventually include a few clouds and a bit of drizzle this morning.
(Clickenate to embiggenate!)
We would have much preferred a half-inch to an inch of steady rain every day for the next several weeks. We’re in a multi-year drought and if we don’t get some decent rain this year we might start to really be hurting. But we’ll take what we can get, I guess. You’ve got to start somewhere.
Meanwhile, after going out and testing the new phone camera on some deep blue and puffy whiteness, I noticed something exciting!
On my old iPhone 6, the panorama pictures covered about 310º, so I would have to think a bit about what 50º or so I wanted to leave out. It never occurred to me that the iPhone 13 might do better. (My bad!)
In the photo here, you’ll notice those cypress trees on the left and again on the right? They’re the same trees! The iPhone 13 panorama mode doesn’t cut off at 310º or so, it goes all the way to about 390º, MORE than a full circle!
This makes me stupidly happy, but then again, as many have noted, I am a simple creature.
Needless to say, expect more panoramas in your future.
Filed under Panorama, Photography, Weather
Considering that they say we’re going to get a tiny bit (maybe 0.10″ at best) of rain (every drop is appreciated!) tonight and tomorrow morning, there sure wasn’t any sign of it this afternoon!
No processing, straight out of the iPhone 13, no filters.
Here’s to finding the joy in a (potentially) rainy Monday morning and a new week!
Filed under Photography, Weather
A busy, busy day at the hangar, but I wanted to at least snap a couple of pictures with the new phone.
Our F8F Bearcat is undergoing a major overhaul. The engine is off completely, along with a number of other chunks. Here’s the firewall, forward of the cockpit, to which the engine mount, engine, a half gazillion parts, the cowling, and pretty much the whole pointy end of the plane will be attached.
But that might be a few months away, maybe a year or more. We’ll see.
Filed under CAF, Photography
Again playing with the iPhone 13 Night Mode, this time with the wide-angle lens and the top of the mailbox as a crude tripod, or at least a steady surface.
(Click to make it bigger – it’s worth it!)
From left to right, that really bright light is the moon (coming up on full in a couple days), Jupiter (directly above the big tree on the left), Saturn (slightly dimmer, just to the left of that line of light in the center), and Venus (very bright, right over the neighbor’s roof on the right).
Blow up the picture and you see that there’s some trailing on the stars from the long exposure. But look at the top of the telephone pole right in the center – surrounding it is the “teapot” of Capricorn. And surrounding Venus is the “head” of Scorpius with Antares being the brightest star.
Not bad for the next step up from 100% handheld. I wonder what happens if I actually use a tripod? Maybe tomorrow night…
Oh, that “line of light in the center?” While often in my pictures that might be the ISS, not tonight. That’s SkyWest Airlines flight #5752 from LAX to Sacramento.
Filed under Astronomy, Photography
I continue to find time to “play” with some of the new camera features of the iPhone 13, not just to learn what it will do and how to do it, but to see if I can push those boundaries and find interesting or different ways to force it to do something unexpected. Thus the term “play.”
Tonight’s idea was to go someplace dark, really dark, and then figure out how it’s supposed to work to give you a really good picture in really low light (it’s pretty cool how it works and how well it works, letting some very smart processing deal with the digital image in real time) and then making the built-in functions keep telling me “Don’t do that!” and trying to drive that processing AI a bit mad.
The results can be spectral.
In short, in low light the camera is doing a long exposure and using digital magic to erase any motion that would blur the long image. I deliberately move the camera – up, down, left, right, sideways, spinning, tilting, closer, further away. And see what happens.
I particularly like this one – not sure where the bright purple spots came from, but they add another level of interesting objects to the image.
Cool “toy.” Fun “play.”
Filed under Photography
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