Whew, that was a long break!

It's been four months since I posted here. Nothing of note has happened to cause this long pause, except I've been busy with life, making YouTube videos, repairing typewriters for people here in ABQ, et cetara.

In the meanwhile, I continue my daily walks, which I enjoy for the experience and also as continued therapy from my two hip replacement surgeries. I'm walking from 3-5 miles every day along the suburban streets of northeast ABQ. I also like to take photos. Or "make" photos, perhaps a better way of describing the process, as "take" sounds too, well, imperial. I like the idea that I'm just creating my own perspective of what others can also see and react to and, if they choose, create their own images of. I won't get into the theory of photographs stealing the souls of their subjects!

My process of creating photographs of my town has changed over time, and I'd like to talk about that. By "talk" I mean write. Talk with my fingers.



I enjoyed the 1970s-early 2000s era of color photography where I chose a film, exposed it in-camera, then brought it to a "lab" for processing and prints, the lab often being Walgreens or CVS Pharmacy, rather than a pristine laboratory. I felt like between my involvement with the film's exposure with the camera, and seeing the resulting prints, there was this big "black box" void in the middle of the process that was out of my control, yet somehow consistent enough that I pretty much knew whether the results were because of something I did, or not. Sure, there were differences, for example the prints from CVS were warmer and more pleasing than from the Walgreens across the street.

Many photographers my age remember those days, when you pressed the button and, like in the Kodak ad, they did the rest.

I think the early days of digital photography killed the simplicity of what used to be an enjoyable creative pastime, because now you needed computer hardware, software and the skills to use it. There has remained a latent desire to return to those simpler days, not only with people my age but more interestingly younger people too.

For years I've carried a digital camera on my daily walks. For a long time it was several versions of Lumix m43 cameras, then the Ricoh GRiii, then a Canon T5i (a gift from my brother), then back to the Ricoh. I liked the OVF (Optical View Finder) of the Canon, but not the size, weight or the images. I liked the EVFs (Electronic View Finders) of the Lumix better than the back screen of the Ricoh. None are perfect.

All of these produced "files," not images; in the sense that they weren't worthy of being shared directly from the memory card but had to be post-processed first. Implying that I was now the photo lab doing that middle-stage process that was once a black box, back in the film days.

Eventually I tired of the process: build up a sizable backlog of images on the memory card, eventually upload them and spend half a day processing and culling them. Drudgery.

I should mention that I've had a black and white darkroom for decades, still do, and enjoyed making nice prints, but sitting in front of a computer wasn't cutting the mustard.

So I started taking only my phone with me on my walks. Not a state-of-the-art phone either, but an iPhone 13. Standard phone app. Standard film style. Square format, both because I like that format and also holding the phone sideways in landscape orientation unnecessarily telegraphs to other people my photographic intentions. I wish to stay somewhat subtle and undercover about my documentary activities.

I immediately noticed carrying the phone in my pocket was much easier than toting a camera around my neck, and I didn't need worry about the weather getting a camera wet.

There were several usability factors I soon discovered that worked in my favor with the phone. First, screen brightness - much brighter on the iPhone than the Ricoh, Canon or Lumix cameras. This is important in the American Southwest in daytime. Second, playback mode. Switch from camera to playback in an instant on the phone, whereas a dedicated camera acts like it does so only begrudgingly.

Most importantly, computational photography. Not AI, but what preceeded AI in phone photography: making a decent image with both shadow and highlight detail preserved, a more subtle, sophisticated form of HDR, not artificial looking but more like what your eyes see.

In effect, the phone is now doing the drudgery that the drug store photomat once did for me.



But better than the drugstore photomat, I still have some control, after-the-fact. I usually hit the "enhance" button, then reduce highlights a bit, boost shadows a tad, and then apply a subtle vignette. And then when I've built up a sizable backlog of such images, I upload them to my Flickr and delete them off my phone. No need to buy more iCloud space from Apple. Also, the images I wish to backup get Air Dropped to my Mac and stored on an external drive. I feel like I'm in control, but not a slave to a corporation or an outdated process.

Is this a perfect process? No. The Ricoh could technically make "better" images; better in the sense of a much larger sensor, finer lens sharpness and lens-to-sensor matching. But the Ricoh can't make straight-out-of-camera images anywhere close to the iPhone in terms of dynamic range. Neither can the Lumix or Canon cameras.

In my experience I've come to value dynamic range more than acutance. Maybe it's because I live in the land of extreme contrast, harsh sun, dense shadows. Or maybe it was the decades I spent working with cobbled-together pinhole box cameras and employing paper negatives with crappy dynamic range, working around extreme limitations.

The computational power behind my old phone's camera helps its tiny sensor fight well above its weight class, but it's easy to blow highlights if the sun is directly in the image, and there's no lens hood shielding the phone from stray light and flare.

I'd love to see a larger sensor camera module paired via cable or Blue Tooth with an iPhone app: the best of a larger sensor with a modern phone's computational power.



Mirrorless cameras are s-l-o-w-l-y getting better but they seem like dinosaurs in comparison. Heck, even action cameras have taken a huge leap forward and are now challenging mirrorless, like with the Go Pro Mission 1 Pro ILS (a mouthful and a half of a name) that offers an interchangeable micro-4/3 lens mount (albeit with the smaller "1 inch" sensor) and slow-motion video up to 960 frames per second, in effect a miniature cinema camera.

Apple has an advantage with integrating hardware and software together, whereas Android has to take a generic operating system and work within its limits. Samsung at one point made mirrorless cameras with an Android OS. I'd like to see something like that again.

When I go out on my daily walks now, I feel like I did when I was younger: looking at compositions and being confident, with the power of immediate playback, that I've captured what I wanted (or, if not, I can retake it immediately,) and can share it with minimal fuss after, instead of dreading an hours-long image editing session on the computer.

But there are limitations to my phone, for example it has only two cameras on the back, a normal and a wide (not state-of-the-art). And I have to pinch-zoom to get any reach, which is just a crop, and the images can easily fall apart with any sizable crop. I'm looking at getting a new phone case that supports mounting a moderate external telephoto lens. I don't need telephoto all the time, but it would be nice to have it when needed.

I think this is why people young and older are on the hunt for a creative process where the backroom-laboratory-I-don't-want-to-know-how-the-sausage-is-made process is taken care of, we don't have to worry and fuss over it. This is not a new thing: us Boomers (or Generation Jones, in my case) enjoyed this for decades with photo labs at our beckoning, before the era of desktop computer photography: load and shoot the film, drop it off and later you have prints in hand. Maybe this is why Fujifilm Instax is also popular. Somewhere along the way, maybe it was the computer era of the 1990s, we bought into the need to bring desktop computers into the process.

*Gasp!*

I spent a 30-year career making chips for Intel, I don't care to fiddle-faff with PCs if I can avoid it, just to get photos processed! I'd rather be out walking and taking photos that are immediately good enough. Lucky for us we now have miniature computers in our pockets that are good-enough to make the sausage for us, and we can just enjoy those moments making (yes: MAKING, not taking) our photos.

PS: Initially written on my BYOK.