Images By Casey

Made a trip this morning to meet some folks for breakfast. It turns out, I had the wrong day. Rather than waste the trip, I wandered around a bit on this Saturday morning. The sun was breaking through the clouds and, quite often, if you look around, you’ll see some dramatic lighting. I looked across Pleasant Street at a bagel store that had some interesting things in front. I looked past that and saw a church and that’s when it it me, “Wow! Light!”. I had my iPhone and thought I should try to shoot a panorama.

Normally, I shoot panoramas from left to right. I made sure that as I lined up the overlapping images (usually you need to overlap by about 25%), I paid attention to the oncoming traffic. I wanted to make sure no person or vehicle was captured twice. If this happens, you get weird ghosting. Even without such overlaps, you can end up with ghosting. I did, here, but it’s not too bad. As I was managing the overlaps, I noticed the yellow car and hoped that I could capture it in its own frame. I especially wanted that yellow to help make the image pop.

I recently got an iPhone thanks to points I’d accumulated from my American Express card use. I have had iPhone envy for a while and part of that envy came from seeing photos other photographers made with their iPhones. Now, the newer model even has HDR capability and that’s something I’ve been playing around with recently using my DSLR. Of course, the iPhone’s HDR is simpler and less extreme…but that leaves room for post processing, which I like to do. So, I thought I’d spend some time going forward using my phone in exactly the same way…for the pure pleasure of making good photographs. The fact that the iPhone is so useful in other ways, like being a phone, is nice, too.

I was walking up from my mailbox when I saw the tree shadows on the fresh snow. I thought, wouldn’t that make a nice photograph. Then, all of a sudden, I remembered my iPhone.

I was in the local Price Rite and spotted a spherical mirror over the fresh fruit. I positioned the iPhone to get just the elements I wanted.

I really liked the pattern that the snow and fence created here. It’s going to take a while before I get used to framing an image using the back LCD of either a camera or my iPhone. I’m so used to optical viewfinders that I’m sure I may have gotten a better angle. This one isn’t bad, though.

Earlier In The Month

Shortly after I got my iPhone, in early January, I had a chance to go for a short photo excursion with my brother, Art. He’s a terrific photographer and will often spend more time shooting a scene that I will. That leaves me time to not only make a few photos of my own, but often include photos of him making photos. Here’s one image from my Project 52 posting for Week 51.

The posting states that I was fooling with HDR and that shooting ice might be a good test for this. Truth be told, I’m not sure I really had the camera set to HDR mode. The ice photos worked, though, because, it was an overcast day.