When to Use the iPhone Camera and When Not

I was at the beach the other day, and I decided to use my iPhone camera. The temperature was over 90 degrees, there was no one on the beach, and it was very bright. I spotted a group of trees and thought I would try to capture the hot, bright barrenness. So I clicked an iPhone image and sent it to Twitter and Facebook. Now, you may know that it is nearly impossible to view a bright image on an LCD screen in the direct sun, it looked a bit dark, but I sent it into hyperspace anyway. Patricia had her Panasonic camera with her a she took a picture of the same scene.

When I finally got to see the image on a computer screen out of the direct sunlight, I can only believe that politeness alone prevented anyone from commenting on how horrible the picture was. It was so dark I hardly recognized the beach. Whereas the image made with the Panasonic camera looked correctly exposed. I have to believe that when the iPhone camera sees an overexposed scene, it does everything it can to compensate, and in this case it did everything, and overcompensated. The sky was bright, the sand was bright, and the water was bright, so the image ended up being murky dark.

So when is the iPhone camera a good choice and when is it not? Well, if you are not in a hurry don’t use it. Use your other camera! However, if you need features like the ability to post on the Internet immediately, you have no choice, and the iPhone camera will have to do. But, don’t be like me – try to resist posting everything, be selective, and pass on the image if it is below your typical standards. See if you can figure out which photo was taken with the iPhone and which with the Panasonic.

By the way on the was to the beach we traveled through a cloud of what is known locally as “lovebugs”. Fifteen minutes of travel on route 41 and there were over 200 sacrificed “lovebugs”. I estimated about 100 splats on the windshield but the amorous lovebugs are usually found flying in pairs. It might have been more interesting tweeting a picture of that mess, but I was focused on finding a car wash and cursing myself for even venturing forth in the car.

We are preparing for another photo trip (see the proposed routes at the very bottom of these blogs) and will keep experimenting with sharing photographs through a collections of tweets, blogs and Facebook, and of course I probably continue to use the iPhone camera.