Tag: camera

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Flowers with moon and jupiter

I spotted this view of the moon and Jupiter bordered by flowers while at the Orange County Fair last week. While I love the look of the shot, it’s terribly grainy and full of compression artifacts. My phone isn’t great at things like zoom or low light conditions. I’ve been using it as my main camera for the past year, since it’s great in bright daylight, and my old camera is riddled with dust I can’t get rid of. But this, plus plans for a vacation where I knew I’d really want a working zoom, combined to be the last straw.

Major criteria:

  • Serious optical zoom
  • Low light
  • Long exposure
  • Wi-Fi would be nice, but not critical

I checked out a bunch of cameras and settled on a Canon PowerShot SX710 with 30x(!) optical zoom. They’ve automated a lot of the mode settings the older models used to have, but there are still a few specific modes you can use and you can still take photos with manual settings. And yes, you can transfer photos over Wi-Fi, to a device, a computer, or a cloud service.

One of the first things I did after charging the battery was go outside to see how it handled night shooting. Then I looked up and saw the moon.

Moon

So far, so good!

Amusingly, this happened the last time I bought a camera too.

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I finally bought a new camera yesterday. I picked it up on a clear, beautiful March afternoon, and my first impulse was to drive up into the hills to Vista del Norte and start taking scenic photos of the entire Los Angeles Basin. I could get a great panorama from Santa Monica in the west, across the San Gabriel Mountains to the north, a glimpse of the next range over, all the way to Long Beach in the east with Saddleback behind it. Then I could go up to Del Cerro Park and get some shots of the coastline, the ocean, and Catalina Island in the late afternoon light.

Of course, they don’t ship the batteries charged, which put a quick end to that plan. And today, it’s overcast and smoggy.

I did, however, get this shot of the moon when I left a few hours later on a trip to the grocery store.

It was right around sunset, so the sky looking east was actually a medium blue, but with the short exposure needed to get details on the moon, it ended up looking black. This is the first photo I have taken of the moon that shows texture. I think this will do!

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*sigh* I’m mostly happy with my G1, but I just read about the upcoming Samsung Memoir, which is the first phone I’ve seen that really takes the approach I’ve been looking for in terms of photo capability: instead of a phone that’s also a camera, it’s a camera that’s also a phone. Even the press release describes it as “designed to look and feel like a customer’s current point-and-shoot digital camera.”

Memoir cameraphone

Key specs:

  • 8 Megapixel camera
  • Flash
  • 16x Digital Zoom
  • Touch screen
  • 5 shooting modes
  • 3G connection
  • Connects to Flickr and other photo sharing sites
  • GPS navigation

It quotes Samsung’s Bill Ogle as saying, “This is the camera phone that will make people want to leave their digital camera at home” — which is exactly what I want from a camera phone.  It’s what I’ve wanted in a camera phone for years, and now that I finally bought a new phone, now someone’s actually selling one.

On top of that, it’s being offered by T-Mobile, so I’d be able to get it at an upgrade price — or could have if I hadn’t just upgraded to a G1 three months ago!

Of course, the press release leaves out a couple of critical items:

  • No mention of optical zoom
  • No mention of mobile web browsing capabilities
  • No mention of extensibility
  • No specs on how much memory it has, or what kind of card it takes (probably the usual micro-SD)
  • No Wifi

I’ve come to really appreciate the G1’s fully-capable web browser and the Android market for third-party apps, and I’d be reluctant to give that up. If the Memoir is a camera first and a phone second, the G1 is a handheld computer first. As for zoom, I have yet to see a digital zoom that was any better than just cropping an image in Photoshop.  And even with a 3G network, I’ve found it does take time to upload the G1’s 2-megapixel images. For 8 megapixels, I’d really want wi-fi.

Ah, well.  With phones, as with many things, you have to take the plunge sometime, or you’ll keep waiting for the next model, and the next, and the next, never actually make any change at all.