Picture more

Today, a simple tip for you all: take more pictures. Pictures document your life and the lives of those around you, and this is of course well worth doing.

Look at this link (click): people in old snapshots, and then in the same picture, shot the same way, many years later (compliments to the modern photographers for making their image quality as bad as in the originals, which is quite a feat). Talk about time. Meant to be funny, but in fact profoundly interesting, even moving. You owe it to yourself to document your life.

And not just the big things. Little things. Like the drive to work.

Or the drive into the city.

Or dinner.

Or even the sauce that is about to become dinner.

You will of course have noticed that all these are recent iPhone pictures. The best camera is, as the saying has it, the camera you have with you.

A few tips on iPhone photography:

  • You can focus where you like, by clicking on the screen in the desired area prior to taking the picture
  • When you do this, the iPhone also exposes for that area. So a normal snow pic will be too dark, but if you focus on your car’s dark dashboard, the picture will be well exposed.
  • You cannot zoom (except electronically, which ,means cropping – do that in Lightroom instead). So instead of zooming, do a lot of diagonal images to compose. That allows you to get close and get a lot in. Trust me, tilted images are OK.
  • An iPhone includes the GPS coordinates automatically with every picture.

So my advice: do carry your iPhone and do occasionally take pictures – and do look at those as a chronicle of your life.

4 thoughts on “Picture more

  1. One quick safety tip: GPS coordinates are only included in the picture data if you have that setting turned on. If you leave it on and then upload a picture to a social media site (Flickr, for example), the EXIF data including the GPS coordinates might be included. So if you don’t want people to know exactly where you live, be careful what you post and where. Or, scrub out the EXIF data before uploading. I don’t know if there’s a tool for that on the iPhone, itself, though, so it might be an issue if you’re taking advantage of the convenience of the app infrastructure.

    I love modern technology, but the privacy implications sometimes take the fun out of it.

  2. Quote: “You will of course have noticed that all these are recent iPhone pictures.”

    Aha! I’m calling the police right now! 🙂

    Remember that using a handheld electronic device while driving in Ontario, and some other locales, is illegal. Doesn’t matter whether you’re talking or taking pictures. Giving advice on how to take cell phone pictures while driving may not be a wise idea.

    Also, using any camera while driving is considered, at best, “careless driving” or at worst, “dangerous driving”. Simply reading the LCD on the back of your camera while driving is also illegal. Even if a frontseat passenger is taking the pictures and they turn the camera or cell phone to show the LCD display to the driver, that’s illegal too. So beware.

    • Ah but Warren, I would never encourage anyone to do anything illegal. (Provided I believed in the law: I would not, for instance, have any hesitation before recommending my Arab friends engage in “illegal” demonstrations). Indeed, the passengers who take the pictures must never show the camera to the drivers. 🙂

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