Remembering that your phone’s camera is still ultimately a phone camera…
February 20, 2023, 12:21 PM
Recently, I was reminded that my phone camera will only get me so far. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a great camera, with all sorts of functionality built in that creates some downright stunning shots. But it is still ultimately just a phone camera. When I really need to go the distance, my real camera, a Nikon D5300 DSLR, will do that. I got this reminder during two visits to the Old Town section of Alexandria, Virginia, when I photographed the Wilkes Street Tunnel on November 23, 2022, and on a return visit on February 15, 2023.
The first visit, which was part of a much larger adventure with Elyse, as well as our friends Aaron and Evan Stone, was one that I was somewhat unprepared for. I had known about the tunnel for a while, and it had a place on my “photo shoot ideas” list (which I jokingly refer to as “the place where photo ideas go to die” considering how many things I add to it, but how little I cross things off of it), but visiting it was not part of the plan. I didn’t necessarily plan for the day to be a big photography day, but I had made allowances for it nonetheless. I brought my DSLR along, but I didn’t really intend to do much with it, and certainly didn’t bring the tripod along. When we ended up at the Wilkes Street Tunnel, more or less by chance, I was kicking myself for not having brought the tripod along. So I just used my phone, and shot it with handheld phone shots. The results were okay, but not great. Specifically, I didn’t like the way that the lighting along the ceiling looked in my shots, with lens flares around the lights. Other than that, the shots were fine. Besides the lights, my biggest annoyance was that it was early evening, and people were frequently moving through the tunnel and getting in the way of my shots. My rule is that you don’t disturb people using a facility as it is intended while you’re photographing. You wait for them to pass and then continue, and if they stop for you, you wave them through. The idea is that you can’t get too upset about them, because they’re using the tunnel for what it was intended for, so you just have to work around them.
Continue reading…Categories: Alexandria, Cameras
Shooting macro with a new phone…
March 5, 2022, 6:10 PM
At the end of February, I got myself a new phone: a Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra. This is the latest and the greatest as far as Samsung phones go, as of the time of this writing. I typically get a top-of-the-line phone for myself, mostly because of how much I use it for photography. I also like a big phone screen, especially now that I am in middle age, and have to hold things further away from my face in order to read them clearly. This new phone was a bit of an update compared to my last phone, the Galaxy S20 Ultra. It still looks and acts like a Samsung phone, so there was very little learning curve, but it’s faster, easier to read, has a better camera, and has the S-Pen (which I had not had since 2017, back when I had a Note 5). Most importantly, though, the camera is much better than the S20. The S20 Ultra’s camera was a bit farsighted. It did just fine photographing things that were far away, but it couldn’t focus if you got really close to it (sounds like me!). So in order to get the proper effect, you had to back up and then zoom in. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked well enough. Sounds like when I need a magnifying glass in order to read the fine print sometimes.
So with the new phone in hand, Elyse and I went out, and I took it for a spin while running some errands. I was interested in trying out the improved macro function, and focused on shooting things really close up. We got together with my friend Matthew, and he got to see me do my thing, getting up, on, over, and around everything while Elyse did the things that she needed to do.
Our first stop was Fair Oaks Mall, where Elyse wanted to go to BoxLunch, which is a gift shop. I had assumed that BoxLunch was a restaurant, i.e. a place where you can buy a boxed lunch (imagine my surprise to find out that they didn’t sell food!). While Elyse was going around there, Matthew and I waited outside, where I took the new phone camera through its paces in the mall, focusing on the details in the sitting area just outside of BoxLunch:
Categories: Cameras, Cell phone, Fairfax County, Gaithersburg
Clearly, I know how to break a drone…
November 24, 2021, 2:54 PM
I haven’t mentioned it on here yet because it’s discussed in an upcoming photo set, but I got a new drone last month while I was on my trip to North Carolina and Hampton Roads. My DJI Mavic Mini threw a propeller blade and crashed nearly 400 feet up in the air while I was photographing a shopping mall in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. I was positioning the drone for my first shots of the mall, and then I noticed a “motor error” message and saw some uncommanded rotation. Then I saw the view start to tumble, and the connection with the remote dropped. I was soon able to reestablish contact, and found the drone on the ground, laying on its back in the grass about 500 feet away. Here’s what it looked like when I picked it up:
Categories: Cameras, North Carolina, Vacations, Woomy
When your drone starts to act up…
June 7, 2021, 11:20 AM
On Tuesday, June 1, Elyse and I went on a little adventure in Prince William County, Virginia, where the goal for me was to photograph some old AT&T Long Lines infrastructure up close with the drone. First of all, for those not familiar, AT&T Long Lines is a now-defunct system from the mid-20th century used for telecommunications via microwave transmission. It has long since been replaced by more modern systems, but many of the towers still remain. Some have been converted to cell phone towers, with varying amounts of the old Long Lines infrastructure abandoned in place. I’ve photographed about six of these things in varying degrees of detail, mostly in Virginia, both ground-based and with a drone.
On this particular day, I had two towers in my sights: one near Dumfries, and one near Manassas. The Dumfries one was directly off of Route 234, and the Manassas one was a little bit further off of the beaten path. The Dumfries tower was in full form, with its horn antennas still attached, while the Manassas tower had lost the old horn antennas.
Here are some of my photos of the Dumfries tower:
Categories: Cameras, Northern Virginia
Taking my photography to the skies…
October 6, 2020, 10:37 AM
I suppose that it was inevitable. When Elyse and I were out meeting up with someone in Baltimore back in March, they had a drone device that they used for a lot of aerial photography, and they showed it off to us. I loved that thing, a DJI Mavic Pro 2, and they gave me all of the information about it so that I could do my own research. I wanted one of those things, but I couldn’t justify a $2,000 price tag for a drone that nice when I had zero experience flying a drone, and didn’t have a good idea about what I wanted to do with it. So I sat on the idea for a while, occasionally going on Amazon to drool over the drone that I knew I couldn’t justify to myself. Then I found a somewhat lower-end drone, the DJI Mavic Mini. A $500 price tag was easier to justify, and that price also told me two things: first, it was expensive enough that it would do what I wanted it to do, but also cheap enough to be a good, accessible starter drone. I asked the experts on Reddit, and the consensus was that it was a good entry-level drone, and it could do everything that I was looking for it to do. So I went on Amazon and bought it.
One thing that I got a quick crash course in after I bought this was the regulatory environment for drones. Basically, you can’t just take this thing anywhere and fly it however you want. Like the roads, you share the airspace with other users, and as a drone pilot, in the big hierarchy of pilots, you are down where the dog lifts its leg. And that’s how it should be. I’m flying an unmanned vehicle, and as such, my feet are firmly on the ground at all times. If something goes wrong with my aircraft while I’m flying, the worst thing that happens is that I lose my drone, as well as all of the material that’s stored on the card. I might be unhappy about losing my drone and the photos stored on the card, but no one’s going to die should this thing fail mid-flight. Compare to a real pilot, who’s actually up in the sky with their aircraft, and if something went wrong there, there is a very real possiblity that someone could be seriously injured or lose their life. Therefore, I quickly learned that you have to do your homework before flying. Thankfully, there is a phone app called B4UFLY that will tell you what restrictions are in place in different areas. Right offhand, I live in the Washington, DC area, and as such, there is a lot of restricted airspace there, because Washington. In short, don’t even think about flying in DC, and you probably don’t want to fly in the suburbs, either. Right around my house, I also have restrictions because there’s a small airport (GAI) nearby. Once you get out of the immediate metro area, though, it’s fairly wide open, though national parks are a blanket no-go. But outside of that, there’s plenty of stuff to do.
Categories: Cameras, Frederick County, Montgomery Village
Going to show that you never know what you’ll find at the thrift store…
July 30, 2017, 2:39 AM
It’s amazing what you find sometimes when you hit the thrift store. Case in point, at Unique Thrift Store/Value Village in Hillandale Shopping Center, Elyse and I found this:
Categories: Cameras, Elyse, Shopping, Silver Spring, Today's Special
Exploring an abandoned house…
March 20, 2016, 7:21 PM
This past Thursday, Elyse and I explored an abandoned house in the Elkridge area of Howard County. This was my first “real” venture into urban exploration, and also the first “operational” photo shoot with the new Nikon SLR. I have had at least a casual interest in urban exploration for a long time, but never did a full-on exploration before. The closest things to urban exploration that I had done prior to this were visiting the buildings on Afton Mountain on several different occasions (but not penetrating them very much, if at all, on any of these occasions), and also that relatively brief visit to Lorton Reformatory last year. Elyse, on the other hand, has a good bit of experience over a number of years with urban exploration. So I was in good hands here. After all, Elyse clearly looked and acted like she knew what she was doing in Lorton, while I was more the clueless sidekick, as I didn’t know what I was doing, and was more or less unprepared for that one.
This time, I was ready. I had a headlamp like Elyse had at Lorton along with a few other flashlights, plus, remembering the strong smell of mold at Afton Mountain, I brought a respirator that I used to carry in my backpack to protests back in my activism days, but never used in that context. I also brought some rubber gloves so that I wouldn’t have to actually touch anything with my bare hands. I didn’t know what had been growing on anything at that house, so the gloves gave me more freedom to actually touch things that I wouldn’t otherwise be willing to do.
We had to do a short, but mostly uphill, hike to get to the house, and here it is:
Categories: Cameras, Elyse, Howard County, Photography, Urban exploration
Testing out a new camera…
February 28, 2016, 2:44 PM
So I finally got a new camera, with its arriving at the beginning of this month. I got a Nikon D5300, and got a zoom lens along with it, as well as a new camera bag (i.e. I’m not going to use Big Mavica‘s old bag anymore). I didn’t test a D5300 when I tested a whole bunch of cameras with Elyse, because it wasn’t available. But I tested a number of different models around it. While this one did everything that most SLRs do, this one also had a fliparound screen like the D5500 that I tested, but being an earlier model, didn’t have the price tag of the D5500. It also had built-in GPS, which I find extremely useful, and that none of the cameras that I tested earlier had.
In case you weren’t aware, I contribute quite a bit to Panoramio. You know how you see photos in Google Earth and Google Maps? Panoramio is how a lot of those photos make their way in there. You upload photos, and then you tag the location on a map. The problem comes when I’m shooting a lot of photos in an area that I may not be very familiar with. I’m talking about things like my trip to Richmond in 2013, various trips to Chicago, High Rock, and the like. In those cases, the way I would typically shoot photos would be to take whatever photos with my real camera, and then grab my cell phone and take a quick reference shot. The reason for this was that the phone had GPS, but my real camera didn’t. That worked well enough, but it created extra work both onsite and in post-production. Onsite, I had to take an extra photo with a different camera, and ensure that GPS had gotten a lock on the position. Then in post-production, I had to coordinate the two photos, reading the tag on one photo in order to manually place the photo that’s actually getting published in the right spot. If it sounds like a pain, it’s because it is. Now that my real camera has GPS on it as well, everything has a location tag on it, which makes my life that much easier.
Also, since it’s come up before, a point of clarification: just because the camera has onboard GPS does not mean that the camera will give you directions. GPS is a network of satellites operated by the United States government that provides location and time information to users with a GPS receiver. It is not inherently a navigation system, though the way most people talk about it, you would think that it was. Just thought I’d put that out there.
Categories: Amtrak, Baltimore, Cameras, Elyse, MTA Maryland
Getting a “big boy” camera…
January 20, 2016, 1:44 PM
Last Thursday was a lot of fun. I got together with Elyse, with the intent of getting some sample material to evaluate for the future purchase of a new camera. This new camera will be a digital SLR, as I am quite confident that I have outgrown the “prosumer” level of camera that I have operated on since Big Mavica in 2002. I discovered that in 2014 when I photographed Brighton Dam and Triadelphia Reservoir with a borrowed Nikon Coolpix P510. The photos with that camera came out well enough, but other than a few extra pixels because of the higher resolution on that camera, I didn’t get any better features than my existing camera.
But first, after Elyse and I got together, we had lunch at Jimmy John’s. I had a sandwich, and Elyse just had one of the day-old rolls that they sell:
Categories: Cameras, Elyse, Food and drink, Maryland, Shopping
Acceptance testing on a waterproof camera enclosure…
July 5, 2014, 9:33 PM
First of all, I had fun at the Outer Banks. I’m going to leave it at that for now, though, because the whole trip is going to become a photo set for Life and Times, and so it’s going to come out, but the “extended Journal entry” treatment in Life and Times is what will do it the most justice.
That said, in preparation for the trip, I bought a waterproof camera enclosure, with the intention of taking photos in the water. The idea behind the waterproof camera enclosure was to get Duckie, my Vivitar ViviCam 6200W, out of the picture. Duckie, to put it nicely, has a very limited operating envelope. It’s because the ISO is too low, as 200 is as high as it goes. That means that when you take that camera underwater, you have to hold the camera very still to get clear pictures, unless you want to use the flash (which I don’t always want to do). It became quite frustrating, and led to a lot of bad photos. Basically, submerged handheld photos were a no-go under the vast majority of conditions. It worked well enough outdoors and in daylight on land, but the pictures taken under those conditions have a slight red tinge to them, which is a pain to try to correct. Plus it has no optical zoom, and the buttons were a bit stiff, with the latter’s making the camera’s use somewhat cumbersome.
Thus I got this to replace Duckie:
Infrastructure pix with a borrowed camera…
April 10, 2014, 9:34 AM
I have had my current main camera, a Canon PowerShot SX10 IS, for approximately five years and two months as of this writing. The camera still works quite well, but is starting to get up there in age. For one thing, the fliparound screen on the back of it no longer works when the screen is flat against the camera while facing out. The electronic viewfinder comes on and the screen goes black when it’s in that position. Go figure. I’m also often finding myself “hitting the wall” with the camera as far as its limits go. Some of the ways I want to go with my photography, the camera can’t go there with me because it doesn’t go far enough. Also, if it gives you any concept of how much time has passed, I wrecked Big Mavica in a rainstorm after I had owned it for five years and four months.
All that said, I am looking to replace my main camera. In this case, however, there is no camera damage forcing my hand. My current camera works fine, though it is starting to show some signs of age. And even if the main camera was kaput, I have two other cameras plus a phone as backup. So this puts me in a good position, as there is no pressing need to replace equipment. I also do not feel that I am currently in a position to upgrade, so running on existing equipment works just fine for me.
However, this doesn’t mean that I’m not trying out other equipment when I can. I recently got an opportunity to borrow a friend’s Nikon Coolpix P510 and take it out for a photo shoot. The Nikon Coolpix P510 is a “prosumer” level camera similar to my Canon PowerShot SX10 IS, but is newer and takes photos in higher resolution (16 megapixel vs. 10). I did this mainly to see where the prosumer cameras had gone in the past few years, since I’ve been toying with the idea of getting another prosumer or finally going to a digital SLR.
Categories: Cameras, Photography
And I now have a point-and-shoot camera…
June 6, 2011, 11:56 PM
So I now have four active cameras in my arsenal. I have my real camera, a Canon Powershot SX10 IS. Then I have my waterproof camera, Duckie, a Vivitar ViviCam 6200W. Then I have my cell phone, a Motorola Droid. And now I have a fourth: a point-and-shoot, a Canon Powershot A800. It’s there for when I want to take pictures of stuff in instances when my main camera is unavailable or impractical, like when I’m commuting to and from work, etc. This is something that I can put in my work bag or my pocket, and won’t need its own bag like the Canon. This is the kind of stuff that I would otherwise use my cell phone camera for (making this more of an upgrade over the cell phone camera), but I want to do better quality and have a little more control. This new camera is 10 megapixel, which is the same as my real camera. Thus this one slots between my real camera and Duckie.
And the acceptance testing went as well as one might expect. I’ve used Canon point-and-shoot cameras before, and so this was simply a matter of testing the camera to verify that everything was indeed as I thought it would be, and then declaring the camera ready for operational use.
Categories: Cameras
Leaving for Stuarts Draft in a bit…
January 14, 2010, 11:41 AM
Yes, as soon as the laundry is finished (see, Mom, I am capable of taking clean clothes down when I visit), I’m heading out to Stuarts Draft. I can’t believe that this weekend is almost here. My sister’s getting married this Saturday! She’s going to become Mrs. Chris Lysy on Saturday.
Of course, now I’m going to have to get used to seeing “Ann Lysy” on Facebook and such. That’s just going to be strange to see, but I’m sure she’ll be happy as can be.
Then meanwhile, I am going to get to Stuarts Draft under my own power, despite that the wheel of automotive misfortune has been spinning in my direction as of late. Recall that I’ve not had a good time with the car lately. First the car spazzed out on me on Christmas Eve as I was leaving for work. Then when I was in Roanoke on the 30th with Mom, the car didn’t want to start up. After a trip to the Firestone place in Wheaton when I got back, though, the car was running fine again. However, (automotive) misfortune apparently comes in threes, and on Tuesday, when I went to get into the car to go to work (if I know I’m going to be working late, I drive), I discovered that the right front tire was flat. Greeeeeeeeeat. So I had to call AAA and get the spare put on. Then I was on my way. Then yesterday, another trip to Firestone got my brand-new tire fixed up. The comment was, 20-some thousand miles is what this thing is supposed to last, and it didn’t even make it to 100. But they fixed it, and determined it was probably a bad seal.
Categories: Cameras, Family, Mercury Sable
You know, I’d wanted for years to have a life in and around Washington. Now, I’m going to be glad to spend a week away from it next month.
July 17, 2008, 11:25 PM
Yeah, it’s time for a change of scenery. After all, I’ve been living in Silver Spring and working in Washington for a year and two months now. Amazing how time flies. But yeah, in a little more than a month, I’m taking my vacation! I’m going to Virginia Beach, and I’m excited. You do realize I’ve not been on a get-out-of-town vacation in three years, don’t you. The last time I went was in 2005.
This one ought to be a lot of fun, though. Usually when I go to Virginia Beach, I go by myself, and tend to concentrate on my photography, with a bit of a change in scenery. And this year… new equipment! While we certainly miss Big Mavica, its optical zoom sucked. And that was a real bummer in 2004 and 2005 when I hit the beach with it, and I couldn’t get close-in ocean shots from the hotel balcony. Now mind you, I think Atlantic Sunrise in 2004 was a great photo set. But I didn’t get a lot of the close-in detail that I really enjoyed in Sunrise at Virginia Beach from 2000. The close-ups really made the earlier set special, and technical limitations prevented me from doing that again in 2004. Now I’ve got a 12x optical zoom, and different nighttime settings, so we’ll see what happens this time around.
But what really excites me is the idea of using my waterproof “duckie” camera. I’d love to take that one out into the surf and see what I can get. After all, the thing is waterproof, so we might as well make good use of it. Big Mavica, to quote Fenton Crackshell from Ducktales, was “more gizmo than duck” when it came to water. So taking “duckie” in the ocean really ought to be fun. Might even cause me to spend a little more time in the ocean than I did last time. I think last time, out of four days, I spent a grand total of three hours in the water. But yeah, with “duckie”, it ought to be fun.
Yeah, I can’t wait until August 24…
And we are once again fully operational. Now I just need something to photograph…
May 4, 2008, 9:16 PM
I finally got a chance to test the new Kodak Z1012 IS camera tonight, and let me say that this is a big leap from Big Mavica. So here’s a quick round of test shots:
Categories: Cameras