Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

My Phone Sucks at Taking Black and White Photos

I learned tonight that my phone's native camera can not take black and white photos. I have three other camera apps and they pretty much suck at black and white too.

FxCamera will only allow me to take photos no bigger than 720 x 480. Vignette demo has 4 or 5 different black and white settings. Some are better than others depending on the lighting. The app keeps defaulting back to .3MP instead of the 5MP I set it to the last time I used the app (I just noticed is not available in demo version). Retro Camera has 5 different cameras but only 4 can do black and white. Each of them puts spots or scratches in the photo to make them look old. Only one of them is some what decent, the Fudgecam but it adds a vignette around the photo. So I don't know if I can do this black and white challenge if my phone is shitty at it.
I think these two photos are the only ones that came out okay-ish:


At least it gives me pure black and white and not a lot of gray values, but I did take photos at night. Some of the photos Vignette took were only 318 wide and 13kb ...???? Over all, I think Retro Camera might be my best bet for black and white photos, even if it add spots, scratches and borders. Maybe I need to do another test when it isn't so cold outside.

I also took a lot of video footage of the Highline. I'll trying to make something of it. I'm sure most of it is unusable because it was dark, my hands were cold and I was trying to get footage before the park closed.

Saturday, January 1, 2011

Lensbaby Lens



Due to this video. I may have to rethink my dislike for Lensbaby lens. I don't like how photos look so unpolished. Not in the same way that Lomomgraphy photos look unpolished. Most photos taken with Lensbaby lens look like they were messed up by accident and not on Purpose.

This video shows that the lens may be better used for video rather than still photos. If I ever get a DSLR with video, I may think about getting a lens.

Side note: I didn't know Kanye West sampled that song for his song Blame Game. Now I have to look for the original ...