Second of a series… near the peak of foliage season (mid-October) we decided to fly from Boston to Bar Harbor, Maine, following the shoreline, in a Robinson R44 helicopter. Tony Cammarata was in back with a door removed (frosty!) and a Nikon D850. Instrument student Vince Dorow was with me in the front seats.
Here are some of the images, in 8K resolution, starting just north of Portsmouth, New Hampshire:
The 226-room Cliff House just south of Ogunquit (maybe one of the COVID-19 billionaires will purchase this as a personal quarantine residence for the next round of mutant virus?):
First of a series… near the peak of foliage season (mid-October) we decided to fly from Boston to Bar Harbor, Maine, following the shoreline, in a Robinson R44 helicopter. Tony Cammarata was in back with a door removed (frosty!) and a Nikon D850. Instrument student Vince Dorow was with me in the front seats.
Here are some of the images, in 8K resolution, starting in Newburyport, Massachusetts and going through Hampton, New Hampshire:
Up through Rye, New Hampshire:
and then to Portsmouth, New Hampshire:
I’m also working on an 8K YouTube video, tied up for some time in a copyright dispute due to scammers downloading public domain music from musopen.org, rolling it into profit-seeking YouTube “albums”, and then claiming it as their own original copyright material. (The copyright claim seems to be cleared now, but YouTube’s servers are still crunching away to build 4K and 8K versions.)
A challenging high-contrast night scene for the iPhone 12 Pro Max:
I hope that you all appreciate our Christmas lights…. Merry Christmas!
(Okay, perhaps I have falsely taken credit for this neighbor’s epic display.)
As long as we’re celebrating Jesus’s birthday, a story about his father/mother/other….
Rudy Giuliani and Victoria Toensing are leaving the courtroom after arguing on behalf of Donald Trump and they get hit by a taxpayer-funded empty city bus.
God meets them at the pearly gates and asks if they have any questions.
“Yes, we do,” says Giuliani. Toensing steps forward and asks “What would the result of the 2020 election have been without the Democrats’ fraud?”
God replies, “It was an unusual year, with all of the unsolicited mail-in ballots encouraging my lazy young children to vote for the first time. But the 18-year-olds actually did vote for a bigger government and for Presidents Biden and Harris. Remember that it will be years before most of them get jobs and start paying taxes, so it makes sense for them to vote for more handouts. Removing the fraudulent ballots wouldn’t have changed the result. Biden won by a narrow margin.”
Rudy Giuliani and Victoria Toensing are stunned. After a moment of silence, Giuliani turns to Toensing and whispers, “This goes higher up than we thought.”
Public aquariums have webcams, e.g., from the Georgia Aquarium (funded by Home Depot founder Bernie Marcus and reopened, unlike our aquarium here in Boston).
What about for hobbyists? We should be able to buy a product that goes into the tank, gets power from a USB-C cable, and transmits video back up the cable to a wall wart that then pushes the video up to a server or at least a local computer. This is basically the same hardware as in an $85 Ring Stick Up camera, right, but cracked into a couple of pieces and a little more waterproofed?
Why doesn’t this product exist? Why can’t our fish “go live” on Facebook without a lot of custom engineering?
(And, no, it wouldn’t be acceptable to have a camera on the outside of the tank due to algae growth. Nor is it easy to find that kind of product already packaged up!)
I finally managed to carve out 20 minutes to go over to the Verizon store and swap my iPhone X for an iPhone 11 Pro Max (20 minutes turned into more than one hour thanks to Verizon’s 9 Mbit in-store WiFi).
I’m in love with the camera so far. Here are a couple of challenging scenes with the standard camera…
(mostly backlit; note the bearded hipster behind the 3-month-old Corgi)(tough job watching Head of the Charles)
Verizon sold me a Gear4 Battersea case. It might be tough, but it makes the already huge phone a little too big for a blue jeans pocket. The case buttons are super stiff and make it tough to turn the phone off from the top side button. An Amazon reader says “after using it for a week I noticed that it has extremely scratched up all four sides of my iPhone”. It is so rigid that I am skeptical that it would protect the screen from shock in the event of a drop. The soft silicone cases seem much more likely to be helpful for a drop on concrete. One good feature: The case is thick enough to keep the lenses of the cameras off whatever surface the phone is resting on.
Readers: Do you carry an iPhone 11 Pro Max in a front pocket? If so, what case works well? What about the Apple silicone case? The Verizon sales guy scared me off by saying that it lacked a bezel to protect the screen from a face-down drop.
The latest Samsung Galaxy Note is now the top-scoring smartphone at DxOMark. It has a 7-point lead over the Apple XS Max, for example, but what’s more interesting is that the phone offers a 13mm-equivalent super wide-angle lens, useful for landscape and perhaps real estate (make an apartment look much larger!). No optical image stabilization on that super wide lens, unfortunately, so it will be best for daytime use.
As with Apple, Samsung calls a normal perspective lens (52mm equivalent) a “telephoto”.
The comparison images at DxOMark show a surprising amount of improvement over Apple, despite not having what you’d think would be required (much bigger sensor and, consequently, thicker phone).
Are we going to be entering a golden age of smartphone photography?
Major UK newspaper The Telegraph has revealed that Apple has pulled cutting edge camera technology from its upcoming iPhone 11 line-up and the company has nothing comparable to replace it. With Apple (controversially) redesigning the iPhone 11 around its massive camera upgrade, the news is a shock.
Where does that leave photographers who want the best possible images from a Smartphone? All of the top-ranked cameraphones on DxOMark are Android (Huawei and Samsung topping the list). What has kept me on iOS, though, is that the Apple software is great at wringing the best out of the sensor, e.g., with color balance or intelligent focus point selection.
What’s the next big cycle for Android? Not until spring 2020 for the new Samsungs? Nobody is doing my dream phone with extra thickness for a substantial battery, a bigger sensor, and a bigger lens, right?
What will Apple have? A three-lens system like Android phones have already had for a while? (history)
My iPhone X is less than one year old (required replacement under warranty), but it already seems a little weak in terms of battery life. If I can hang on until September will there be a world of photographic improvement from the next generation of iPhones?
Google purchased Picasa, a super efficient photo editor that offered seamless integration with online publishing (e.g., you add a photo to an album on your desktop computer and it automatically gets pushed to the online version of the album). When they were pushing their Facebook competitor, Google+, they set it up so that Picasa created Google+ albums.
Now they’re going to waste millions of additional hours worldwide by breaking links to all of the Google+ albums that they had Picasa create. People will either have to edit a ton of links and/or, having arrived at a broken link, will have to start searching to see if they can find the content elsewhere.
Example: my review of an Antarctica cruise on the Ocean Diamond. It was so easy to publish the photos via Picasa that I just linked to the photo album from the HTML page. Now I will have to move the photos somewhere else, edit the HTML file, git push, git pull, etc. Then repeat for every other blog posting and web page that links to a Picasa-created album.
Maybe this is why Google has a corporate mission of making the world’s information accessible? They’re the primary force now in making information inaccessible?
