100 Days of Black and White Photos: Day 16

I was experimenting with a Diana F+ Electronic Flash and a see through purple water bottle that contained water.


I haven't used my Diana F+ camera in years and I forgot that I had the flash too. I was looking for something else when I came across the flash. When I turned it on, it still worked. So that meant I had to find ways to use it. This also means I need to finish up the roll of film that is already in the Diana Camera. It has probably gone bad, but I still have to try. This is also inspiring me to shoot film again.

This photo was taken on my Zenphone 2 with the Camera FV-5 app. The bottle was off to the right about 1.5 to 2 feet away and I held the flash behind the bottle. I believe this phono was taken with ISO 50, 8 seconds shutter and f2. It might have been 5 seconds but I can't remember and I can't check the file because I saved the photo in PNG.

I recently learned that apps on iOS can save photos in an uncompressed TIFF format, which saves more details and helps out when editing the photo later. So I search and search to see if I could do the same on Android and the best I could get was to save to PNG. PNG files don't save EXIF data. The most it saves is the date the photo was taken. I was testing out saving in PNG because I wanted to see if my photos will look better with more information saved because PNG uses lossless data compression. I really didn't see a difference between the PNG and the 100% JPEG photos. I also noticed that the app took longer to save the photo to file from buffer when using PNG. This meant that I sometimes lost photos if I wasn't paying attention that there were already a couples of photos in the buffer waiting to save to file.

With Android 5.0 (lollipop), the new camera2 API allows camera apps to save photos as RAW DNG files, have access to manual focus and more. This is exciting! The only problem is, most phone manufactures have not included the firmware that allows apps to use these features. Right now, only about 4 phones that have Lollipop are using the camrea2 api. My phone is new and has Lolipop, but it can not save to DNG. The Camera  FV-5 has a setting to save to DNG, but it knows my phone can't use it, and give the option of saving to PNG. I hope ASUS sends out an update to include this soon.