Cell-phone photographer in the making

A conversation with Alison a few days ago jogged my thinking about taking photos, about using the capability in my cell phone when a regular camera wasn’t available or practical. A major motivation is that I often have wished, after the fact, to have a picture to support the text in a blog but none is available. So, last week I did some reading on cell phone picture-taking on the web and in my phone manual, bought a micro USB cable for off-loading cell pictures to our computer, and started practicing on my cell phone photography.

What I have learned is that I can now handle the mechanics (take a picture, take another picture quickly, setup and perform the off-load to a computer). It turns out that the latter process is almost identical to off-loading digital camera pictures, so was easy to master. The photographing process (with my cell phone, at least) reminds me somehow of taking pictures when I was little boy with my mother’s Kodak Brownie, the prototypical “box-camera” of yesteryear– you need lots of light and you have to make sure you don’t wiggle the camera. Differences are that you don’t have to pay for processing bad shots (which most of mine have been), you can get images in lesser-light conditions and you get color (sort of, but “Photoshopping” the shots after transferring them to your computer is helpful to get a semblance of quality.

Here is a comparison of my best cell-phone shot of the Soderquist family, as we were together with them Sunday for Paul’s and Daniel’s pre-mission sacrament meeting talks, with one from Matthew’s big Canon digital SLR (borrowed from Facebook–thanks Matthew).