Rocking My Camera-Part II
This is a nice photo, right? A portion of the New York skyline taken at dawn from Jersey City.
Would it surprise you to know that I took it from my hotel room one morning? Nah, at this point, probably not. OK, but might it surprise you to know that I took this lovely shot, not with my Nikon, but with my iPhone camera? Ah hah…I might have raised a few eyebrows with that one, right? How can a crappy cell phone camera take such a great shot?
Well the truth is that under the right conditions and with a little knowledge, you can truly rock your cell phone camera. I know, I know…it goes against the conventional wisdom that I blogged about last August. You know the belief that it’s all about the camera. Put a high end camera in anyone’s hand and s/he becomes a fabulous photographer, since the camera does all the heavy lifting. Insert eyeroll here.
Well as I said before It’s Not JUST the Camera. Just as getting a high end set of golf clubs doesn’t turn someone into Tiger Woods (though being a serial philanderer just might…), a tool works only as well as the person is able to make use of said tool. Me with a high end set of golf clubs will have something to use to smash the mushrooms that grow in my lawn. They will do little to improve skills I do not possess. Yet give me a Bic pen, a knitting needle and a person with a pneumothorax, and I’d be able to decompress the air in the chest cavity so that s/he can reinflate his/her lung. Of course after that someone better get this person to a damn hospital because I’ve got nothing with which to fashion a water seal and suction. MacGuyver I ain’t.
So anyway, since everyone into photography, whether hobbyist or pro gets the Wow, Your Camera Takes Great Pictures! comment at some time or another, the folks over at Clickin Moms decided to have a little contest on this very theme. The main task of the contest: taking fabulous photos using only your cell phone camera. Post processing was permitted, but as we all know, you can’t rescue a crap photo with Photoshop. There’s got to be some good stuff there to work with at the beginning. So to this end, I opted to enter my iPhone photo above.
Even in Photoshop it wasn’t messed with a ton. I used Photomerge for the first time to join the two photos I took into one panorama. Now that’s a cool function! I ran noise reduction, color pop and sharpening. The contrast and midtones were tweaked a tad because of my anal-retentive perfectionism. But ain’t it purty?
Of course it doesn’t hold a candle to the others that the ladies have posted for the contest. My goodness, what fabulous photos. I wish I could link to them but unfortunately the group is member only.
But here are a few others that were taken with the ol’ iPhone and were played with in Photoshop.
See, even more proof that it’s not JUST the camera. Though it doesn’t stop me from drooling over the Nikon D700.