# 205 – Mobile Landscapes

I’m a member of a Flickr group called Mobile Landscapes which is for landscape photographs taken on mobile phones. In some respects this is a faintly ludicrous concept, as landscape photography is traditionally regarded as a contemplative art, where you take your time in choosing the optimum composition, wait for the best light, and often involves the use of a tripod, larger cameras, quite often medium or large format. But of course you can take landscapes on any camera, it’s as much about the right time and place as it is the equipment (unless of course you’re looking to sell prints or publish a book, etc).

However, sometimes you don’t have a thundering great camera, lens and tripod to hand. We’d popped out for a lovely meal at the superb Crab and Lobster pub in Bembridge on the Isle of Wight and as we were about to leave we decided to take a quick walk down to the adjacent seashore. The sun was setting and the sky was various pastel shades, so we sat and watched the flotilla of ships on the horizon, presumably having left Southampton on the tide and were now heading off into the Channel. Even thought hey were several miles away, we could hear a gentle thump-thump of their marine diesels on the deserted shore. Noticing that the battery on my phone was virtually dead, I decided to get as many photos as I could before it expired, as it seemed a shame to let the lovely scene in front of me be lost to my memory.

This is probably the pick of the bunch, inspired very much by the contemporary landscape genre seen in the photography magazines every month. I’d love to have had my 16-35 mm lens and my 70-300 to pick out the little rowing boat in one of the pools, but that’s life.

# 199 – Nokia N8 – Printing A3 from a cameraphone!

While the needless insanity that was the compact camera megapixel race has seemingly slowed down, the rate of progress seems to have transferred over to the mobile phone market. I heard recently that Samsung (or was it HTC?) are planning a 16mp cameraphone, while my Nokia N8 has a 12mp sensor, which is as many as my Nikon DSLR (albeit on a sensor a fraction of the size). Now all this is all well and good for the marketing people, but if the picture itself is crap from this overcrowded sensor, then it’s all a pointless exercise.

So far, I’ve been impressed with the images off the N8, certainly the ones taken in good light of static subjects. But what are they like on paper? Or is that missing the point of cameraphone images (as I imagine 95% of them are only ever viewed either on the phone itself or online)?

So I decided to test this by printing them out on my printer, at 6×4 and also at A3, just to see if there’s any value in having a 12mp sensor. And just for kicks, I printed a similar image from the Nikon for comparison.

Now this was an entirely subjective test, I don’t know how to measure print quality other than with a good old-fashioned Mk1 Eyeball.

The digital version of the image, uploaded striaght from the phone

The result – better than you’d think. OK, when viewed next to a similar image from the D700 you can see the differences if you look, but for the most part you wouldn’t know. If you look closely, you’ll see some areas seem slightly less well-defined, I’m putting this down to maybe smears on the lens (no lens cap remember), which have got magnified on a large print.

Photograph of a print – very detailed and sharp enough for my tastes.

Another photograph of the print – this is the area of the shoreline almost directly below the picture above. It looks slightly smudged, for lack of a better word. Again, I think this may have been where there was a smear or something on the lens – it is very small and although scratch resistant glass (apparently), so it’s probably worth giving it a wipe before use.

Good though the Nokia is as a camera, it’s badly let down by the near total absence of decent apps, something where the IPhone is so far ahead, it’s out of sight. If the IPhone 5 has a camera and lens that’s a match for the N8, then the cameraphone market will truly have come of age.

#174 – Astley Hall

Been busy recently with family and suchlike, so although I’ve taken plenty of photos of my 8 month old daughter, not much indutrial has been in front ofmy lenses. I’m busy writing various blog posts but have found that I’ve not got the photos I need to illustrate them online, grrr. So, here’s one from a trip to my local park, Astley Park in Chorley. I’d not bothered to take a proper camera, so it was cameraphone to the rescue again. I now think of it as a ‘mobile device’, something that slips into my pocket and can make phone calls, take photos and video, browse the internet, send email and text messages, and even act as a sat nav / google maps viewer. How did we manage without them………………..

# 173 – Nokia N8 vs SLR again!

A couple of Bamburgh Castle from my holiday in Northunberland. Very impressed with the N8 again, in fact I took more with it than on my compact.

By way of comparison, here’s one from the D700, at this size there’s nothing in it.

 

#168 – Attack Of The Giant Egg Cups – Thorpe Marsh Part 2

A few years back, I spent some time working on secondment in the east of the country, and on my drive home, I’d pass various different sets of cooling towers, some abandoned, some active, and yet they all fascinated me. These huge egg cups can be seen from miles around in the flat countryside that the A1 passes through, and I decided that at some stage I’d like a closer look at one. Unfortunately, all the power stations in the North West (bar one – Fiddlers Ferry) have been demolished,  so the opportunities were somewhat limited. I then become aware through the urbex community that Thorpe Marsh was accessible, so it’s been at on my to-do list for ages, but I’d not been able to find the time to have a look.

Suddenly though, I found myself passing through the area en route to somewhere else, so, not wishing to let this opportunity slip by, I took a slight detour. As I approached through the pretty villages to the south of Doncaster, these huge concrete edifices dominated the skyline of the rural landscape. And then there I was, sat at the low, rusty main gates of the site, looking over the decimated scene of a long demolished power station. Just as I got out of the car to take a photo though, a Transit van came tearing down one of the site roads and pulled up at the gate. A National Grid employee got out  – dammit! Rumbled before I even got on site! Actually, no, the guy unlocked the gate, drove the van out, re-locked the gate and drove off. (National Grid still own the site and have a large transformer farm and depot on the opposite side of the site to the cooling towers.)

After a few snaps from the gate, I had a wander round and found myself at the foot of one of the huge towers. I’ve never been that close to one before, and they really are impressively big close up. Alas, the high winds on the day made not only photography difficult, but actually walking around possibly due to the turbulence caused by their shapes. That, combined with the fact that I was not exactly dressed for exploring, and the fact that I needed to get back on the road, meant I only had time for a brief mooch and a few snaps. A pity, as I could easily spend a couple of hours looking round., but definitely one to take another look at before they decide to demolish them.

#167 – Attack Of The Giant Egg Cups – Thorpe Marsh Part 1

Thorpe Marsh near Doncaster. Dust blowing everywhere, high winds nearly blowing me out of my size 10 work boots, and a post apolcalyptic landscape. Need to go back for another look.

#164 – The Last Days Of Fernhurst Mill

 I find it sad when I see old mills being demolished. Maybe it’s because of their immense size and seeming permanence, or just their familiarity in the northern landscape, but gradually the number is decreasing. I must admit that the rate of demolition seems to have slowed in the past few years, partially due to them often being converted to apartments, partially due to their not being that many left now, and those that are, are often in the less salubrious areas of town where the type of people who buy fashionable apartments probably wouldn’t be welcome.

Looking up

I’d seen some reports on various exploration forums of this mill, but hadn’t had chance to go and have a look. However, I was in Oldham visiting my company’s site nearby, so at dinner time I popped out.  It’s probably too late to explore now as the majority of the floors now appear to be in a large pile outside the building, so as I was in work wear, and there was demolition workers on site, I settled for a few externals from the adjacent ginnel.

Big claw – more precise than the swinging iron balls of old

These are from my phone – I’d taken my Nikon F100 film camera to use up some film, but the batteries expired just as I took the first shot! D’oh! That’s the thing with film cameras, the batteries last months, or years, and as the battery meter is best described as ‘vague’, so I never even thought about checking it before I left the house. Oh well, that’s why I got a phone with a decent camera, you never know when it’ll come in handy!

 

Most of the upper floors were now in a big pile outside, not ideal conditions for exploring really.

#156 – Nokia N8 vs DSLR

Yes it’s a stupid comparison, a cameraphone vs a professional SLR and lens. Or is it? The N8 is in no way a replacement for an SLR, but it is a useful supplement, as it is massively portable, and capable (in the right circumstances) of producing good results. What I’m doing here is not so much comparing the two cameras or their images in a ‘which is best’ comparison, more to say this is an image from an SLR as a benchmark, and here’s one from the phone.

This is not a scientific test, and a more valid comparison would really have been against a compact camera, but I didn’t have one with me! There’s only so much gear I’m prepared to lug around!

 Here’s one I took of the Duke Of Lancaster on the Nokia, followed below it by a 100% crop.

And here’s one from (about) the same spot using a Nikon D700 and Nikkor 28-70 AF-D lens. This was taken in raw, and smart sharpened to 100% at 0.5 radius, but no other adjustments.

Conclusion – well, when I downloaded all the photos from the day into a Lightroom folder, I was pushed to tell what images were from what camera, until I started to pixel peep at 50-100% Of course, all the raw files were slightly soft as they were unsharpened, and when this was done, I started to notice the difference that really good glass makes. But, the N8 files were very good quality wise, and were well exposed.

Of course, these were photos of a large object, in good light that wasn’t moving. Change any of these variables and the N8 falls on it’s arse, as the D700 stands over it gloating, but that misses the point. The N8 is a phone that amongst other things takes pictures and HD video (which I’m told is a good thing?), whereas the D700 is a dedicated piece of kit that will only take photographs. And it is the Nokia which is in my pocket wherever I go, while the Nikon sits at home most of the week!

A few more photos in this post here.

#153 – The Duke Of Lancaster 1

I’ve never really got excited about mobile phones, only replacing mine when they were worn out or broken. However, now that they’ve become mobile computers that can also make phone calls, they’ve started to interest me a bit more. not so much the technology itself, but what that technology allows me to do. I’d started to use the camera on my last phone, a Nokia of some description, and found it to be not bad. So when the Nokia N8 was released, I took an interest as it was described as having the best camera ever built into a phone – a 28mm Zeiss designed lens and a 12mp sensor. Of course, more megapixels do not make a better camera, but with the sensor apparently larger than that in other phones, and even some compacts, it had to be worth a look.

I took a load of photos during the recent snowy weather and was pleased with the results, so I thought I’d give it a go when I went to have a look at the Duke Of Lancaster in Mostyn.

I’ll go into the history and such of the ship in my next blog post, but here’s a couple of snaps from the N8. These are straight from the phone, unedited apart from a crop to one of them, in fact I uploaded them straight from the phone to Flickr. When I went through the photos for the day in Lightroom, it was genuinely difficult to tell which ones were from my Nikon DSLR and which were from the phone. Of course, I was shooting raw on the Nikon, so the files are not the finished article, but this just goes to show that the photos from the N8 are very good indeed. The caveat here is this – the light was good, and the subject was completely static. Move away from these conditions and performance suffers, make no mistake.

However, as the name of Chase Jarvis’s book suggests, the best camera is the one that you’ve got with you, and if that camera is on a phone such as this, then you’ve got a chance of taking some very good photos. It’s in no way a replacement for a DSLR, but as it’s a lot more pocketable than a compact (albeit without a zoom), so the future could see some interesting developments.