BirchTree

I posted this yesterday as an example of why I love, love, love having a “real camera” back in my life.

I didn’t get many responses, but I did get some people saying they thought the iPhone picture was better. Why? They liked the detail and the fact that the highlights were not blown out. These are fair, but they didn’t change my mind at all because of a few things.

1. This photo showed me an example of the Sony camera doing something the iPhone simply couldn’t do. The bokeh in particular was really nice, but I could have also changed the aperture and gotten a deeper depth of focus to look more like the iPhone.
2. The iPhone photo was definitely sharper, but that’s also due to the shallower depth of field I used on the Sony shot. The Sony pic was taken at f/1.8, which meant the focus are was a few millimeters. The wording “New Belgium” is out of focus because it’s not the spot I chose to focus on. Again, a more closed aperture would have had more elements in pin sharp focus.
3. And maybe most importantly, the Sony photo was edited in Lightroom before posting it. The blown highlights were a stylistic choice, not something out of the camera. Here’s the RAW version of that photo, highlights and shadows intact.

As I wrote in October of last year, I am not particularly interested in doing "straight out of the camera" comparisons because that's not how I actually share photos. Especially when comparing smartphones to RAW images, since RAW images are inherently bland. You are expected to do things with them.

I just think that the world of camera comparisons has made us get to a place where we judge picture quality based on whether highlights are blown out, shadows are crushed, or clarity is as sharp as can be. For the average photo, these are great qualities, but they are not what you want in every single photo.

But here’s the other thing: I think the iPhone has a better camera for most people than the Sony RX100. The beauty of the iPhone camera is that you can open the app, point at something, and snap a photo without thinking. 95% of the time it’s going to get the focus, exposure, and everything else basically perfect. You don’t have to think about it and it works some magic to get you want you want.

Take a look at this photo:

This was taken while I was literally running down the sidewalk with my phone pointed in Sherman’s general direction and with me randomly snapping the shutter button. Given those conditions, this photo is remarkable!

This simplicity and flexibility is absolutely the right thing for the iPhone, as most people using iPhones are not professional photographers. But for people like me who want to have more flexibility in our shots, want more options in editing, and who want to have a higher limit on the quality of picture we can take, a dedicated camera can serve us very well.

Last December, I wanted to compare night modes on the newly released iPhone and Pixel phones. Totally reasonable, and exactly the sort of thing you’d expect to see on this blog. So I waited for the sun to go down and around 9PM I headed out to a local park, which I knew had some fun lights up, but would be completely dark.

“You’re going to go walk around a dark park in the middle of the night?” my wife asked me.

“Sure, why not?” I replied.

She couldn’t understand the feeling that walking around a dark public park after hours could be seen as a totally safe thing to do.

Fast forward about 30 minutes and while I was taking pictures around the park, which I’ll admit kinda did look like someone casing the joint for a robbery, I was approached by a police officer who asked me what I was doing. I remember thinking “yeah, I could see why he’d be curious.” I proceeded to explain to him that I write for a tech blog where I compare smartphones and I was doing some tests to see which phone was better. He listened and asked some questions about which phone I thought was winning, and after a couple minutes he let me carry on.

What I remember about that interaction today is how little it bothered me at the time. I wasn’t nervous, something I could verify by cross-referencing the photos before and after our talk with my Apple Watch’s heart rate data, and this is the window where I was talking to the officer:

Yeah, totally steady, I wasn’t worried at all about the situation escalating or anything. I may as well have been talking to a friend.

I bring up this event because it is a great example of my privilege as a white man. I went to a pitch black, wide open space and didn’t worry at all about my safety. I was questioned by a cop about what I was doing and my heart rate didn’t so much as blip. The idea of either of those things being remotely dangerous were completely foreign to me.

This past week we have seen nationwide protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd. I’ve been largely silent on the issue both here and on social media, largely because I don’t know what to say. There is an immense amount of pain that has been growing for many generations among people who don’t look like me in this country. There is a distrust of institutions to do the right thing. There is pain as every on-video murder of a black man sees a demographic scower the web for reasons that the murder might have been justified. It pains me that I can’t remember the source, but I heard a clip from a podcast on Twitter where someone asked the question, “how many white men have you seen murdered in high definition?” As I write this Sunday morning, I struggle to think of a single name, but I can recall several names of black men from just the past couple months.

I don’t talk a lot about this stuff because I worry about saying the wrong thing. I worry about not properly vetting my sources and saying something that’s either untrue or lacks required context to understand or appreciate.

So I listen. I listen to people who have different perspectives than me, people who have different perspectives simply because of the way they look. I listen to people who talk about wrestling with how they are going to raise their kids in a world that forces them to grapple with things I’ve never had to ponder for a second.

So yes, #BlackLivesMatter yesterday, today, and tomorrow. This hashtag is not a signifier that only black lives matter (as the AllLivesMatter folks would twist it to mean), it’s a reminder that black lives matter too. You would think this doesn’t need to be said, and some people will tell you that it doesn’t, but there are piles of evidence that as a nation, we do need this reminder.

And of course, in this time of pain and division, it would be very nice to have a leader who was invested in uniting the country or taking action to diffuse the mounting tensions causing the current wave of protests, but that’s not who we have right now.

Timothy Klausutis writing to Twitter's Jack Dorsey (via The New York Times):

President Trump on Tuesday tweeted to his nearly 80 million followers alluding to the repeatedly debunked falsehood that my wife was murdered by her boss, former U.S. Rep. Joe Scarborough. The son of the president followed and more directly attacked my wife by tweeting to his followers as the means of spreading this vicious lie.

And:

I’m asking you to intervene in this instance because the president of the United States has taken something that does not belong to him — the memory of my dead wife — and perverted it for perceived political gain.

We can debate Twitter's role in being an arbiter of truth, but let's take a second and think about how insane it is that the President of the United States chooses to spend his time during an international pandemic to spread wild lies about people he doesn't like.

The birther movement he helped popularize could be dismissed as the racist ramblings of an idiot, but now it's the ramblings of an idiot in the White House.

This is patently insane behavior and is yet another example of why this goon is unfit for office. It's such a common thing, in fact, that I suspect someone will tell me that he does this all the time and I shouldn't be surprised anymore. I'm not surprised, I just refuse to accept this as "that's just what he does" and not call out insanity in the moment.