Tag: Photography

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Photo Essay Photography Writing

Capturing a January Snowstorm with the iPhone 14 Pro

Toronto ended up getting a proper snowstorm late January. While it wasn’t the first snow of the year it was the first proper storm that saw 15cm of snow (or more) coming down over the course of many hours. In fact, the snow was coming down heavily enough that I didn’t want to risk my non-weather sealed cameras: I’m happy to get them damp by snow but in this weather they were certain to get soaked.

So what was I to do? Despite not being in love with the iPhone 14 Pro it’s a weather sealed camera and capable of making some decent images. So I grabbed it, donned my winter weather gear and some smartphone-compatible gloves, and headed out for a few hours of capturing the city.

When I went out I decided to increase the exposure a bit–set to 0.7–to keep the snow from coming out grey, but I found that exposure kept resetting. I half suspect that this was due to a combination of the somewhat bulky gloves I was using and the water on the screen resetting or modifying the exposure slider. Still, given that I was shooting in ProRAW I could generally modify exposures to my taste when I got home and did some light post-processing.

Speaking of the ProRAWs…I accidentally left the 24mm (equiv.) sensor set to 48MP images from the last time I was shooting with it! Which in hindsight explains why it often took so long to go from pressing the shutter button to capturing an image; I’d thought the delay was because of an issue with the conductive gloves or the cold or the water on the screen but, in fact, was was due to the file size. As always, I should have fully checked my equipment (and its software) before heading out. I’m just glad that I have a 512GB iPhone so at least I didn’t need to worry about running out of space on the device!

I did end up coming home with some smaller files using the main sensor from when I was shooting in burst mode. In burst you will default down to taking 12MP images on the 24mm (equivalent) lens and I used it when shooting faster-action scenes earlier in my walk.

In some notes to myself about the iPhone 14 Pro, I previously wrote:

The 48 megapixel main camera (24mm equivalent) when shot at its full resolution, in ProRAW, doesn’t work well for street photography. I tend to shoot bursts to get people stepping just so in a shot, but there’s an approximately 1 second or so delay in capturing one image and being able to capture another. That’s a shame as this is supposed to be a highlight feature and the A16 processor and specialized ISP just cannot process things fast enough for how I shoot street.

At the time, I didn’t realise the camera app would shift from taking 48MP to 12MP images under burst mode. It’s, also, not something that is apparent in the user interface. Just like, when in the camera app, there’s no indication or warning that you’re shooting at 48MP! All of which is to say that the stock Camera app on iPhone is getting very long in the tooth and is in desperate need of an overhaul.

Lest it sound that I only have negative things to say I should be very clear: I managed to go out and make images for several hours and came back with some that I liked. I couldn’t have gone out with my other camera gear. Since I thought I was shooting with the 12MP 24mm (equiv.) main lens quite often I tried to be fastidious in how I framed shots because I wasn’t going to be able to crop much. By happy accident, this ultimately meant that the images shot on that lens ended up being much higher quality than anticipated due to capturing 48MP images in all of their glory.

I also took the time to use the ultra-wide as well as telephoto lenses. I admit that I just don’t have a huge amount of experience shooting ultra-wide and so this was a fun experience in seeing what I could capture in the scene. Other images that didn’t quite make the cut saw me experiment with cutting the frame in two, with a divider in the centre of the frame and building scenes to the left and right of it. While I didn’t get any publishable-quality photos it was a good experiment and reminded me of just how challenging it is to replicate photographic masters who use this technique, like Sean Penn. The images I made with the 78mm lens, however, often ended up being too soft and ultimately I’ve opted to publish only one of them (above, woman walking away from sign with an arrow on it while looking at her phone).

When I went out I had hoped that I’d be able to capture the sense of how much the snow was beating down on everyone in the city. I think this came true as the iPhone didn’t shoot above 1/120 of a second the whole day, and at times was as low as 1/23. The result is that the snow is apparent and the subjects–unless they were relatively unmoving–have a bit of blur to them as they raced from place to place.

At the same time, because of the snow most people couldn’t move as quickly as they would on clear sidewalks and roads. It was an interesting personal lesson, insofar as I realised that in this weather I can probably easily get away with 1/80 to 1/200 and get sufficiently sharp images that still communicate the fury of the weather.

As I kept walking, however, a number of annoyances returned. I absolutely hate how holding your finger on the shutter button in the stock iPhone Camera app records a video instead of firing of a burst shot. This was a problem because when I was trying to take a single image sometimes I’d get a very short video, instead, meaning that I was without a photograph! I get that this is how most people probably want to use the app but it’d be nice to be able to customise the app’s functionality some. Especially if these are supposed to be ‘professional’ devices. Also, for reasons I couldn’t figure out, the Podcasts app also sometimes sped up the episodes I was listening to, or even skipped to the next podcast. Frustrating!

It had been quite some time since I’d walked through Chinatown during a real dropping of snow and it was great to see very familiar scenes in slightly different situations. Catching someone shovelling while, at the same time, a customer was taking refuge in a doorway was a real catch for me. I’m sure I’ve captured images from this location (as in the very spot I was standing in to make the image) dozens of times; this is a very different feel and texture than those I tend to make at this location. Win!

I ended up walking through Kensington Market last year during a slightly-less intense snowstorm and was rewarded with an image that was amongst my favourites of the year. I don’t think that I caught images that will necessarily fall into the same bucket this year, in part because several times I wasn’t able to activate the iPhone camera quickly enough. Still, I liked capturing how desolate the Market was, which was largely reflective of how quiet it was.

I did like how, towards the end of the shoot and into the evening, the snow started to come down even heavier which had the effect of leaving little droplets of water on the lens. While these blotches do upset the ‘perfection’ of the image I think they, also, have the effect of making it that much clearer what the weather was like and ideally put the viewer more firmly into the cold and wet scene.

It was on my return trip home that the worst of the weather was apparent for those who had to brave the wet snow that had piled up over the past many hours. There were relatively few pedestrians out, even at the major intersections, as compared to better-weather times. Hoods were up and high, foot slips were common, and cars were throwing up huge volumes of grey and brown slush onto anyone who happened to get too close to the curb.

Amongst the bravest of the brave were the few cyclists who continued to try and share the road with Toronto drivers. Between the streets that hadn’t been cleared and the erratic behaviour of vehicles whose owners hadn’t driven in the snow in over a year, it seemed risky and not that much faster than just walking. Still, they made for interesting subjects when they were waiting for a chance to get onto the road and make their way to their destination, and especially with the streetcar lines overhead layered with snow.

While cyclists arguably had a hard time of things, even harder times were surely experienced by the parents I saw who were trying to push strollers around. The snow routinely got into the wheels with the effect that parents were just pushing the strollers without the help of the wheels. Still, almost every stroller had a plastic barrier separating the child from the storm which at least meant that the little one’s weren’t getting soaked on their ways home.

Ultimately the images that I came back with after several hours of shooting are qualitatively different from anything I’d have made with my Fuji X100F or Ricoh GR or GRiiix. At least to my eye, they have a feel of an older camera and, due to the slow shutter speeds, many of the images remind me of film photographs I’ve seen of past Toronto winter storms from the 1970s and 1980s. Many also have an almost more intimate quality, to my eye, due to the technical imperfections that resulted from lighting conditions and occasional focus challenges. Still, I feel like they present the experience of the storm that lasted throughout the day and night, and which left the city blanketed in white by the following morning.

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Aside Links

What is Documentary Photography?

Black Tap Magazine has a helpful article that distinguishes between photojournalism, documentary photography, and street photography. I found it particularly helpful to see the author grapple with the differences (and commonalities) between documentary and street photography, with the former focusing more on projects and potentially posed/non-urban photography, and the latter being cast as more spontaneous and less project-driven. While I think good street photography should be emotive and tell a story over time, I appreciate that the core assertion is that documentary photography must tell (or try to tell) some story, often as a photo set, whereas street photography is not similarly bound by these conditions.

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Photo Essay Photography Writing

First Snow of 2023 Photowalk

We got our first snow of the year on Sunday. I kept waiting for it to come and as soon as the snow started to fall I grabbed my Fuji X100F with a Cinebloom 10% attached and headed out to make some images.

I live in a densely populated section of Toronto. Notwithstanding the snow there were many people out and about when I first hit the streets. But it was as I moved to side streets, or into parts of the city that tend to be populated by tourists, that it was apparent that huge chunks of the city were largely depopulated as people decided to stay inside where it was warm and dry.

There were, of course, some people out even in the less populated parts of the city. They, however, tended to be trying to get out of the snow—which functionally turned into snow that was almost indistinguishable from rain towards the early evening—and generally wanted to just avoid getting wet or cold.

Somewhat surprisingly I saw almost no other photographers out and about. I’m sure they were there, somewhere. But, at the same time, I wonder how much the weather dissuaded them from getting out and shooting the streets or urban landscapes.

I will never be accused of babying my cameras. My Fuji X100F lacks the weatherproofing of the newest version and, so, when I’m out in the snow I tend to protectively place one hand over it’s screen and eyepiece, and keep the lens pointed downwards and slightly in towards my body. It doesn’t prevent all the precipitation from getting onto the camera but, along with brushing off water when it starts to gather on dials and such, has always seemed good enough to keep the equipment safe.

The mix of heavy coats and umbrellas is something that I’m always curious about, if only because I can’t recall ever seeing something similar while I was growing up or when I visit parts of the country (or world) that receive large volumes of snow. I don’t dispute the potential utility of an umbrella—it will, obviously, help to keep your head wet and my uncovered head certainly got soaked after 3-4 hours outside—but it always seems like an instrument that is out of place. Though they look very distinct in the snow and so I definitely took the chance to make images of people who were carrying them!

Though there were people out and about, and evidence in other cases of someone having been present recently, much of the city felt oddly solitary. When I make my photos I’m often trying to communicate a sense of, on the one hand, the press of other people around and upon us and, on the other, the loneliness or isolation experienced while being in these massive urban environments. Dismal weather almost always draws me to the latter and wanting to express how large our environments are and what they look like with few figures or, alternately, in the absence of humans entirely. What will the city look like when the humans are gone?

When I watched one of James Popsys’ videos recently he mentioned that, when taking his landscapes, he likes putting either a human or a human-made thing in his images. Doing so has the effect of communicating human presence and, often, what the natural environment looks in our absence. Human-made things, also, have the effect of drawing us into an image on the basis that we ‘see’ something of ourselves in the otherwise natural environment.

In an almost modernist way of thinking those solitary human-things have the effect of both showing the attempt to overcome, or start overcoming, nature while often simultaneously showcasing the majesty and longevity of nature against the transitory existence of human-made things. Or at least that’s how I see and study such images.

I don’t know how well I really captured ‘nature’ in my walk—save towards the very end of my walk—but Popsys’ words have resonated in my head for some time. For years when I’ve made images of the city it’s often been with a view that the humans are transitory; they move though the frame, they enter and exit the city, they live and die. The built infrastructure and the protected landscapes interspersed throughout the city, however, will (should?) persist for a far longer period of time. Yes, Toronto is a city undergoing profound construction but looking through historical photos of the city reveal that key things have remained for a century or more in spite of the changes.

Of course that isn’t to say that the old has stayed perfectly the same; the bridge I took the below image from is literally a bridge to nowhere that was disconnected from the surrounding roads in 1964. While there were plans to remove it, apparently it’s more affordable to do minimal maintenance on it than tear it down; it’s only a matter of time, though, until this economic calculus changes. The city keeps putting up fences and warnings to keep people off the bridge but there’s only been once in the past decade where the fences were intact and I was prevented from getting onto the bridge. In the summer you can regularly discover some pretty cool graffiti along its struts.

The bridge sits over the Don River and, looking south, you have a view of a highway that our municipal and provincial governments continue to pour money into, as well as industrial lands which have been in declining operation for a long time. While the specific buildings will almost certainly change—most likely to be replaced by condos—the character of the landscape should remain the same for decades insofar as the highway and walking path should persist. Though it may be that a similar image will only be accessible to those flying small drones when the economic calculus for maintaining the bridge changes.

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Photo Essay Photography Writing

January 1st Graffiti Photowalk

I routinely try and take a bit of a longer photowalk at the start of each year. It’s an opportunity to stretch my legs some and a great way to start of the year while, also, getting a chance to document the city while it’s still recovering from New Years celebrations.

This year was no different, save that I ended up leaving for my walk later than intended and was drawn to a number of Toronto’s alleys throughout the evening.

While I did the majority of my shooting through the late afternoon and evening in monochrome, I couldn’t help by see how the positive film simulation in my Ricoh GRs would showcase the vibrant colours of graffiti under artificial lighting situations.

It was only once I’d brought the images home and looked at them that it became apparent that the majority of the photos were made from the same angle. I had no idea I was doing this at the time but, in hindsight, I definitely wish that I’d made images from wider variety of angles.

When I was wandering through some of the alleys I wished that there had been more people about to include in some of the images. Even a wisp of a figure would, I think, have added a bit of a haunting character to many of the photographs.

In their absence, however, I largely (though not completely) tried to channel Tatianna Hopper. She sometimes engages in a kind of street photography that simultaneously showcases the existence and absence of humans. Graffiti and human trash, or waste, expresses this concept to my mind.

In a number of alleys there were quasi-monstrous or demonic imagery. I see more and more of it around the city and have met the artists of some of it. The effort they’re putting in is amazing with really interesting effects; when shooting with humans in the frame and in monochrome, I find the graffiti adds an interesting graphic element and juxtaposition. Even on its own, however, the juxtaposition between colour and monochrome graffiti causes its own novel contrast.

Almost the entirety of 2022, and the tail end of 2021, saw me shoot 99% of my images in monochrome. I’m happy with the progress I’ve made on the street and can see the very real improvements in composition and ability to ‘see’ in monochrome. However I’m inspired by Alex Webb and Gustavo Minas’ ‘Maximum Shadow Minimal Light’. Both use shadow in colour photography and I’d like to develop similar skills . Maybe that means I’ll experiment some through the year in trying to translate what I’ve learned about light and shadows in monochrome images into colour photos!

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Solved

Solved: Ricoh GR Not Using Auto-Hi ISO

I spent a few frustrating evenings shooting on aperture priority with the original Ricoh GR. It held my shutter speed at 1/40s and varied the ISO so that it was always at 1/40s.

I’ve finally sat down to figure out what the heck was going on as I’d never previously experienced this issue. For some reason each time I tried to set the ISO to Auto-High (with a 5000 ISO maximum and shutter minimum at 1/160s) it kept defaulting to Auto, instead.

The Problem

My Ricoh GR was stuck at 1/40s when shooting aperture priority (i.e., ‘Av’) with the ISO varying to ensure it could hit that shutter speed. My work-around solution was to take manual control of the ISO. When I manually raised the ISO I could get a much faster shutter speed.

The Solution

I had previously disabled ‘Continuous Mode’ when I had been experimenting with an external flash. In doing so I had, unknowingly, simultaneously disabled the camera’s ability to use ‘Auto-High.’1 Auto-High is used to set a maximum ISO and minimum shutter speed.2

To enable Auto-High on the Ricoh GR:

  1. Open the menu
  2. Enter the Shooting Menu (Camera symbol)
  3. Scroll down to ‘Continuous Mode’
  4. Press the right button on the control dial
  5. Scroll to ‘Continuous Mode’
  6. Press ‘OK’

You may, also, need to set the maximum ISO and minimum shutter speed for Auto-High. To set these values:

  1. Open the menu
  2. Enter the Setup Menu (Screwdriver and Wrench symbol)
  3. Scroll down to ‘ISO Auto-High Settings’
  4. Press the right button on the control dial
  5. Set the Maximum ISO and Change Shutter Speed to preferred values
  6. Press ‘OK’

At the conclusion of this you should hopefully have (re)enabled Auto-High ISO.

Note: My solution to this problem differs from some on the Internet. A post in the DP Review forums, as an example, suggests that you must disable ‘dynamic range compensation’ to solve the problem. This is not the case in my experience as I have dynamic range compensation set to ‘Medium’ on my Ricoh GR.

  1. This is not clearly explained in the Ricoh GR manual when when doing a search for ‘Auto-Hi’. ↩︎
  2. If shooting conditions are such that the camera cannot expose properly at a given aperture and maximum ISO setting, it may reduce the shutter speed below the minimum shutter speed set under Auto-High to get a correct exposure. ↩︎
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Videos

Is Street Photography Legal In Canada?

The answer, in almost all cases, is a resounding “yes.” David Fraser, a privacy and technology lawyer from Halifax, does an exceptional job in running curious (Canadian) street photographers through what the law allows and the rare exceptions when making street photos could have legal consequences.

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Photo Essay Photography Writing

Which Photo (Or Three…) Best Represents 2022?

‘Til Pandemic Does Us Part | Excluded Audience | Amour by Christopher Parsons

Neale James, host of the Photowalk, challenged the ‘Extra Milers’ to look through our pictures and find one (or three…) which really spoke to our 2022. It could be a best photograph, or one that captures some memory or another, or really anything…the question was deliberately left pretty open to interpretation.

It served as a good experience for me. I went back through the past 11 months of images and, in the process, was reminded of numerous photos and experiences I’d forgotten about.

The first image (“‘til Pandemic Does Us Part”) speaks to how seriously some were still taking the pandemic much earlier in the year.

‘Til Pandemic Does Us Part by Christopher Parsons

The second (“Excluded Audience”) is very similar to an image I made in early 2020 which defined that stage of the pandemic in Toronto for me. “Excluded Audience” is meant to call back to that image and showcase that while things were going back to normal as the year progressed, that normal isn’t necessarily positive for everyone in the city. I’ve also included that reference image (“Down But Not Out”) below, after the set, just to indicate what I was trying to call back to.

Excluded Audience by Christopher Parsons

The final image of the year in this set (“Amour”) is meant to document how things are, today, with those in love able to see and hold one another amongst crowds once more. As a set, I think they have a symmetry in story and composition across them.

Amour by Christopher Parsons

And, finally, the reference image really just captures what Toronto was like in the early days of the pandemic when the entire downtown core had just shut down in its entirety.

Down But Not Out by Christopher Parsons

In terms of process for selecting photos, most years I start by reviewing images that I posted to social media that year, which in 2022 has been Glass. From the 300-365 images I work down to 30 images or so that best tell the story of the year. However, using this process I miss some photos that I really like but haven’t uploaded and, at the same time, include some images in the sort that I’ve somewhat fallen out of favour with since posting them.

All of which is to say: I think that going through and taking the time to review/re-examine all the images we’ve taken over a year is a splendid exercise, and especially because there’s a bit of time between when an image was captured and now. For me, at least, this helped to surface work that resonates more today than I think that it did when I first made it.

How do you go through and review your photos annually? What’s your best photo or photo set of the year, and what’s the story behind them?

Categories
Photography Reviews Writing

Glass 365 Days Later

Wintertime Rush

(Wintertime Rush by Christopher Parsons)

I’ve been actively using Glass for about a full year now. Glass is a photo sharing site where users must pay either a monthly or yearly fee; it costs to post but viewing is free.

I publish a photo almost every day and I regularly go through the community to view other folks’ photos and comment on them. In this short review I want to identify what’s great about the service, what’s so-so, and where there’s still room to grow. All the images in this blog post were previously posted to Glass.

Let me cut to the chase: I like the service and have resubscribed for another full year.

The Good

The iOS mobile client was great at launch and it remains terrific. It’s fast and easy to use, and beats all the other social platforms’ apps that I’ve used because it is so simple and functional. You can’t edit your images in the Glass app and I’m entirely fine with that.

(Fix, Found by Christopher Parsons)

The community is delightful from my perspective. The comments I get are all thoughtful and the requirement to pay-to-post means that there aren’t (yet) any trolls that I’ve come across. Does this mean the community is smaller? Definitely. But is it a more committed and friendly community? You bet. Give me quality over quantity any day of the week.

All subscribers have the option to have a public facing profile, which anyone can view, or ones that are restricted to just other subscribers. I find the public profiles to be pretty attractive and good at arranging photos, especially when accessing a profile on a wide-screen device (e.g. a laptop, desktop, tablet, or phone in landscape).

The platform launched as iPhone only, to start, though has been expanding since then. The iPad client is a joy to use and the developers have an Android client on their roadmap. A Windows application is available and you can use the service on the web too.

(Birthday Pose by Christopher Parsons)

Other things that I really appreciate: Glass has a terrifically responsive development team. There are about 50 community requests that have been implemented since launch; while some are just for bugs, most are for updates to the platform. Glass is also the opposite of the traditional roach-motel social media platform. You can download your photos from the site at any time; you’re paying for the service, not for surveillance. That’s great!

The So-So

So is Glass perfect then? No. It has only a small handful of developers as compared to competitors like Instagram or Vero which means that some overdue features are still in development.

(‘Til Pandemic Does Us Part by Christopher Parsons)

A core critique is there is no Android application. That’s fair! However, iOS users are more likely to spend money on apps so it made economic sense to prioritize that user base.1 Fortunately an Android application is on its way and a Windows version was recently released.

A more serious issue for existing users is an inability to ‘tag’ photos. While photos can be assigned to categories in the application (and more categories have been added over time) that means it’s hard to have the customization of bigger sites like Flickr. The result is that discovery is more challenging and it’s harder to build up a set of metadata that could be used in the future for presenting photos. Glass, currently, is meant to provide a linear feed of photos—that’s part of its charm!—but more sophisticated methods of even displaying images on users’ portfolios in the future may require the company to adopt a tagging system. Why does it matter that there is or isn’t one, today? Because for heavier users2 re-viewing and tagging all photos will be a royal pain in the butt, if that ever is something that is integrated into the platform.

(Tall and Proud by Christopher Parsons)

If you’re looking to use Glass as a formal portfolio, well, there are almost certainly better services and platforms you should rely upon. Which is to say: the platform does not let you create albums or pin certain photos to the top of your profile. I entirely get that the developers are aiming for a simple service at launch, but would also appreciate the ability to better categorize some of my photos. In particular, I would like to create things such as:

  • Best of a given year
  • Having albums that break up street versus landscape versus cityscape images
  • Being able to create albums for specific events, such as particular vacations or documentary events
  • Photos that I generally think are amongst my ‘best’ overall

This being said, albums and portfolios are in the planning stages. I look forward to seeing what is ultimately released.

(Public Praise by Christopher Parsons)

As much as I like the community as it stands today, I would really like the developers to add some small or basic things. Like threaded comments. They’re coming, at some point, after discovery features are integrated (e.g., search by location, by camera, etc.). Still, as it stands today, the lack of even 2-levels of threaded comments means that active conversations are annoying to follow.

Finally, Glass is really what you make of it. If you’re a photographer who wants to just add photos and never engage with the community then I’d imagine it’s not as good as a platform such as Instagram or Vero. Both of the latter apps have larger user bases and you’re more likely to get the equivalent of a like; I don’t know how large Glass’ user-base is but it’s not huge despite being much larger than at launch. However, if you’re active in the community then I think that you can get more positive, or helpful, feedback than on other platforms. At least for me, as a very enthusiastic amateur photographer, the engagement I get on Glass is remarkably more meaningful than on any other platform on which I’ve shared my photographs.

The Bad

Honestly, the worst part about Glass is still discoverability.3 You can see a semi-random set of photographers using the service which isn’t bad…except that some of them may not have posted anything to the platform for months or even a year. I have no idea why this is the case.

(Stephanie by Christopher Parsons)

The only other way to discover other photographers is to regularly dig through the different photography categories, and ‘appreciate’4 photos you see and follow the photographers who appeal to your tastes. This isn’t terrible, but it’s the ‘best’ way of discovering photos and really isn’t great. While the company ‘highlights’ photographers on the Glass website and through its Twitter feed, the equivalent curation still doesn’t exist in the application itself. That’s non-ideal.

The developers have promised that additional discovery functions will be rolling out. They intend enable search by camera type or location, but thus far nothing’s been released. They’ve been good at slowly and deliberately releasing features, and new features have always been thoughtful when implemented, so I’m hopeful that when discoverability is updated it’ll be pretty good. Until then, however, it’s frankly pretty bad.

(Lonely Traveller by Christopher Parsons)

If I were to find a second thing that’s missing, to date, it would be that there’s no way of embedding Glass images in other CMSes. The platform does support RSS, which I appreciate, but I want the platform to offer full-on embeds so I can easily cross post images to other web spaces (like this blog!). Embeds could, also, have some language/links that ultimately let viewers sign up for the service as a way of growing the subscriber base.

The third thing that I wish Glass would enable a way of assessing if a photo has already been uploaded. At this point I’ve uploaded over 300 photos and I want to ensure that I don’t accidentally upload a duplicate. This is definitely a problem associated with those who use the service more heavily, but will become a more prominent issue as users ‘live’ on the platform for more and more years.

Conclusion

So, at the end of a year, what do I think of Glass?

First, I think that it truly is a photography community for photographers. It isn’t trying to be a broader social network that lets you share what music you’re listening to, or TV shows and movies you’re watching, or books you’ve finished, or temporary stories or images. There is totally a space for a network like that but it’s not Glass and I’m fine with it being a simpler and more direct kind of platform.

(Night Light by Christopher Parsons)

Second, it is a platform with active developers and a friendly community. Both of those things are pretty great. And the developers have a clear and opinionated sense of taste: they’re creating a beautiful application and associated service. There’s real value in the aesthetic for me.

Third, it’s not quite the place to showcase your work, today, if you are trying to semi-professionally market your photography. There are no albums or other ways of highlighting or collecting your images. Glass is much closer to the original version of Instagram in just presenting a feed of historical images instead of a contemporary service like Flickr or even Instagram. And…that’s actually a pretty great thing! That said, the roadmap includes commitments to enabling better highlighting/collecting of images. This will be increasingly important as more people upload more photographs to the service.

(Supervisory Assistance by Christopher Parsons)

Fourth, it’s still relatively cheap as compared to other paid offerings. It is less than half the cost of a Flickr Pro account, as just one example. And there are no ads for subscribers or for individuals who are browsing public profiles and associated portfolios.

(Distressed by Christopher Parsons)

So, in conclusion, I’d strongly suggest trying out Glass if you’re a committed and enthusiastic amateur. It’s not the same as Instagram or Instagram clones. That’s both part of the point and part of the magic of the platform that the Glass team is creating and incubating.

  1. Yes, you might be willing to pay money, dear reader, but you’re statistically deviant. In a good way! ↩︎
  2. Such as myself… ↩︎
  3. The developers are, also, very well aware of this issue. ↩︎
  4. Glass does not have ‘likes’ per se, but lets users click an ‘appreciation’ button. Appreciations are only ever sent to the photographer and are not accumulated numerically to be presented to either the public or the photographer who uploaded the photograph. ↩︎
Categories
Aside Photography Reviews

2022.9.18

A couple thoughts after shooting with the iPhone 14 Pro for a day, as an amateur photographer coming from an iPhone 12 Pro and who also uses a Ricoh GR and Fuji X100F.

  1. The 48 megapixel 24mm (equiv.) lens is nearly useless for street photography, when capturing images at 48 megapixels. It takes 1+ seconds to capture an image at this resolution. That’s not great for trying to catch a subject or scene at just the right moment. (To me, this says very, very bad things about what Apple Silicon can actually do.) Set the captured resolution to 12 megapixels in ProRAW if you’re shooting fast-moving or fast-changing subjects/scenes.
  2. The 78mm (equiv.) telephoto is pretty great. It really opens a new way of seeing the world for me. I also think it’s great for starting street photographers who aren’t comfortable being as close as 28mm or 35mm might require.
  3. The new form factor means the MagSafe-compatible battery I use doesn’t fit. Which was a pretty big surprise and leads into item 4…
  4. Capturing 48 megapixel images, at full resolution, while using your phone in bright daylight (and thus raising the screen to full brightness), absolutely destroys battery life. Which means you’re likely to need a battery pack to charge your phone during extended photoshoots. Make sure you choose one that’s the right size!
  5. I like the ability to use the photographic styles. But it really sucks that you can’t see what effect they’d have on monochrome/black and white images. I shoot 95-99% in monochrome; this is likely less of an issue for other folks.
  6. The camera app desperately needs an update and reorganization. It is kludgy and a pain in the ass to use if you need to change settings quickly on the street. Do. Not. Like. It’s embarrassing Apple continues to ship such a poor application.

I haven’t taken the phone out to shoot extensively at night, though some staged shots at home at night showcase how much better night mode is compared to that in the iPhone 12 Pro.

Anyway, early thoughts. More complete ones will follow in the coming week or so.

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Aside Links

2022.8.10

I’ve been making some small changes to Excited Pixels. I’ve updated my list of good podcasts I listen to (it now includes several of my preferred photography podcasts) and I’ve also created a portfolio page that currently showcases some of my recent preferred  monochrome street photography. For my daily photography check out my Glass profile.