On my walk

For years I took my little Leica X1 on my early morning walk. But then I wanted to walk faster and I decided that I had exhausted the photo ops on my walk so I left the camera at home most of the time.

Recently I have been using my new series iPhone SE to take photos on the early morning walk. The image quality is really impressive but still I am not happy using the phone as a camera. It is a matter of haptics-touch and feel and handling generally. It just does not feel right. I find composing and framing the photo on the camera's screen difficult. Maybe it is a matter of what I am used to over many years. Maybe I am just stuck in a groove but I'll take a proper viewfinder any day over a LCD screen.

Having said that here's a photo I took with the iPhone earlier this week. The bird in the tree is a kookaburra-the Australian laughing bird. It's unusual to see a kookaburra in scrub on the cliff top walk. Usually they are in the gumtrees just a few hundred metres in land.There are dozens in the trees around my house and the kookaburras start their demented laughing in unison at around 4.30am at this time of the year. The reason they get away with it is that they look such a jolly, friendly bird. They are the quintessential Australian icon-along with the kangaroo, the koala and the emu.

They have quite extraordinary eyesight. I have watched a young kookaburra sit on the power lines outside my house and spot a tiny skink in the garden 10 metres away and swoop straight down on it and then devour it.

Velocette at the PITS

Classic Velocette, classic location, classic Bristol in reflection, modern photo.

The rider

The rider. A Harley-Davidson Owner's Group (HOG) rider setting out from Jerry's Biker's Cafe, Kulnura, NSW, Australia.

Leica X1 photo.

 

The little camera that could.

Recently I took my vintage Canon G9 out of the back of the cupboard and armed with a new battery purchased from a Chinese seller on eBay I gave it a little workout including this shot of a huge hibiscus flower in my garden.

 By today's standards the G9 is rather basic with its very small 12mp CCD sensor but it did, and still does, turn out great photos under the right conditions. Its achilles heel is that it does not handle low light well as you have to shoot at ISO 200 orbelow for reasonable quality.

In terms of handling it is compact and easy to operate.The controls and menus are very straightforward and the zoom lens is very sharp. The body is metal and the camera feels solid and very well made. It also has an integrated optical viewfinder. 

There would be no place even for an updated version of the G9 in today's market-smartphones have killed the segment-which is a pity because it really is a very competent little camera and I took some great photos with mine.

The photo was taken at 1/1000th at f4.0 at ISO 80 .

Australian dawn

 Beautiful sunrise on a crisp spring morning at The Haven, Terrigal, Central Coast, NSW, Australia.

 

The yawn

At 20 going on 21 Phoebe reckons she's entitled to sleep all day and most of the night. She wakes up at aound 5.00 pm and today after waking she gave a monster yawn before thinking about dinner.

The best of friends....

 The best of friends...snuggled together in the boot of a hatchback at Jerry's Cafe, Kulnura yesterday. Usually these two roam the forecourt of the cafe checking out all the bikers and other customers. At 8.30 am yesterday things were quiet, after a very hectic weekend, so they took the opportunity to get some rest.

Lorikeet madness

 

Lorikeets are very colourful, small parrots which just love eating grevillea flower pollen. They cannot get enough of it and as soon as spring arrives and the grevilleas flower the lorikeets arrive to feast on them. The lorikeets are around all year but spring has to be their favourite time of year.

They are most active and very noisy at first light and in the evening although some keep feeding all day. They climb in the trees and hang on as the branches swing in the wind. Some get so high on the sugar that they fly off straight into the glass around the pool. There is an ominous bang but miraculously in twelve years I have only found two dead lorikeets on the driveway and one dead lorikeet in the pool. Usually they just dust themselves down and start all over again.

Photo above taken today with a Fuji X-E2 -my special purpose camera-fitted with Fuji's bargain basement XC 50-230mm lens at 230mm. I did a fair bit of post processing on it. The photo was taken from my deck just a few metres away from the tree.

Forget Bali and Fiji.......

 

 

It's a long weekend in the school holidays. The weather is glorious. Clear blue skies and warm but not hot.

In normal times Terrigal would be very busy this weekend. But these are not normal times. Most interstate borders are closed and Australia's international borders are closed. So the hundreds of thousands of New South Wales citizens who usually fly to Bali, Fiji, Phuket or Hawaii for the school holidays are staying at home and the result is an absolute boom for NSW coastal towns such as Terrigal. 

I have never seen anything like the number of people on the beaches at Terrigal and Wamberal this weekend. The traffic in the town is awful and the cafes and shops are full to capacity- the main Terrigal beach looks like Rio. A vacant parking space is harder to find than rocking horse droppings. It is a visitor bonanza. The local traders will be lobbying the state and federal governments to keep the borders closed.

I went with one of my granddaughters to Wambersal Lagoon mid-morning so that she could go body boarding. Usually even at the height of summer there would be a dozen cars in the small car park there and a smattering of people-the sandbank in the photo would be empty. Today there were cars lining the road to the lagoon and the sandbank was packed with people. 

Photo taken with my iPhone. I would have preferred to have taken it with a camera but Leicas and beaches do not mix so it had to be the iPhone again. I have actually slightly dialled back the clarity on the photo in Lightroom as I thought it looked oversharp and harsh.

After the storm

 

 

It's officially spring here in Australia. Soon we will change to summer time and the evenings will be lighter-and the early mornings darker. The weather has warmed up although as is often the case at this time of year it is somewhat fickle. Last week it was distinctly cool by our standards. This week it is back to average and warming up. 

On Wednesday night a severe storm hit the coast here at Terrigal, Very suddenly there were strong wind gusts, heavy rain and thunder and lightning. My home has a Colorbond -steel- roof and exterior cladding so heavy rain sounds like gravel being fired at the house.  It certainly woke both of us up although I suspect that Phoebe, the wonder cat, probably slept through the commotion. The storm soon passed and despite all the noise little rain fell.

By the time I went for my usual early morning walk the storm had passed way out to sea as can be seen from this photo taken from the Haven at Terrigal looking south towards North Avoca and Avoca Beach.

It's been my habit until the last couple of years to take my Leica X1 out with me on my early morning walk and this practice has yielded some good photos over the years. However about two years ago 'subject fatigue" set in and recently I have only taken the Leica with me very occasionally.

Four weeks ago I acquired a new smartphone-a second generation iPhoneSE. I've used my previous iPhones to take photos but have very much regarded them as toys when it came to photography. The new phone has changed my opinion. 

On Tuesday I used it to photograph the Austin A30 in Terrigal -see previous post-and this morning I took it on my early morning walk and came back with the above photo. I am really surprised at the image quality (IQ). The photo above is straight out of the phone apart from a small crop to straighten it. The tonality and colour rendition is very acceptable as is the resolution.

The lens on the iPhone is tiny and probably moulded. It may not even be glass and the sensor is equally tiny. The technical data for the photo is 1/180th second at f1.8 ISO 20 on a 3.99mm lens.

The interesting thing about this photo is that it is not the result of superior optics or a big sensor. It is the product of computational photography-for an explantion see Computational Photography also known as computational imaging see  Computational imaging.

Computational photography uses algorithms to create photos. The software determines the image quality-not the lens. The lens is almost secondary-it is merely a portal for the light rays to enter the phone.

Huawei phones promote that they have Leica optics but I wonder is this real or is it just marketing hype? Anyway how many potential buyers of Huawei phones know or even care who Leica is? As Apple and Samsung have proved who makes the optics is totally irrelevant. 

Apparently before their partnership with Huwaei Leica approached Apple looking for a technical/marketing link and Apple turned them away. I remember reading at the time that Leica's chairman, Dr Kauffmann, thought that Apple was arrogant in declining to tango with highly esteemed Leica. We now know why-Apple didn't need Leica's optical expertise-Apple already had a veritable army of the experts they needed-software engineers.

If computational photography is so clever why haven't any established camera manufacturers adopted it and built pro/am cameras using the technology? Well, the Light Co-a newcomer to the market, tried and failed. The Light cameras were very clever-but they were too unconventional, expensive and were probably too far ahead of their time. Light walked away from the amateur photography market in 2018 to concentrate on their special application cameras using their technology.

However many conventional digital cameras do use elements of computational photography in their image processing in HDR, panorama stitching and other functions. Perhaps it's only a matter of time before a traditional camera manufacturer launches a fully computational camera. But would it sell or have the smartphone manufacturers with their massive IT expertise changed the game forever and the camera manufacturers have no chance of matching them?