The Cormorant, the Dragonfly, and the Bee: November 2015

Sunday, November 29, 2015

Fall Scenes plus a few Dogs and a Swan

The crisp fall air, deep blue skies, colorful leaves, and a few animals provide good fodder for photos. I'm glad to share these recent highlights.

Leaf Color Zones

Red and Blue

Paperbark Maple Knot

Some dogs just love water; ...including this handsome animal.

Cold Water Doesn't Slow This Dog Down

A Rock in the Water

Late Fall Color

Fisherman Catching Some Rays

Sun Drenched

Graceful Swan

Halloween Colors

Branch Design

Reflections

Time to Unwind

Pondering

Gold in the Water

Fluffy?

Sunday, November 1, 2015

Goodnight Moon and Other Pleasantries (or is that Pleasant Trees?)

As a followup to my recent post on the Nexus 5X, I did a few quick calculations. I do think that, all things being equal, larger pixel size should produce better photos. The Nexus 5X has 1.55μm pixels which ought to give it a leg up on an iPhone 6, 6s, or 5s, all of which have 1.22μm pixels. The purpose of this post is to not forget what Olympus gives us with its "Four Thirds" sensor: 3.9μm pixels. These are considerably larger than any cell phone, and should generally produce a much superior image.

Here are a few recent shots with the Olympus OM-D E-M5 MkII using the Oly 12-40mm 2.8 Pro lens.

Tall Ensemble

Leaves Over Water

Reservoir Sights

Peak Color Display

Goodnight Moon

Nexus 5X Camera Takes Great Pictures

The battery in my non-smart flip mobile phone is the original one, and since that means it's *many* years old, it can't keep a charge for very long. After a "full recharge", talk time is about 30 seconds before the battery dies! Not good!

Alas, it was time for me to join the modern generation and get a new mobile phone. I thought I'd try the new Nexus 5X direct from Google (made by LG). So far, I'm very pleased with that decision. The phone sports an excellent camera, one of the best in any cell phone to date. Dxomark rates it very highly (it's the same camera as in the Nexus 6P) only bested by a few phones that cost twice as much: see the dxomark website. Notably, it is rated higher than the current best iPhone models.

Google/LG put a new Sony sensor in the camera that has larger 1.55μm pixels, giving the phone excellent photo capturing performance in terms of signal-to-noise and lower light photography. It is easy to doubt such claims, but from what I can tell, this phone indeed takes very nice pictures. See for yourself below.

Hmmm, I wonder what I should take pictures of with my new phone?... How about more foliage pictures? One can never get enough of these, right?

Reflections Across the Road

Shadows on Needles

I (currently) resize all photos to a maximum of 1000 pixels in the longest dimension for this photo blog. Since the originals for these photos are 4032x3024px, considerable detail is lost as you view my photos in your browser. For example, the pine needles in the above photo don't appear particularly sharp. Here is a 100% crop of a portion of the same photo:

Pine Needles

And here is another 100% crop of a different portion of the scene:

100% Crop

While these samples are hardly "super sharp", they fair pretty well as 100% crops go, where one pixel is one pixel in your browser. All I'm trying to say is that the 4032px version looks a lot better than the 1000px version, so don't use my blog as a definitive reference for the underlying photo quality.

Enough tech talk. Back to some photos:

Orange You Glad You Saw This

End of the Res

It is interesting to compare the above photo, taken with the Nexus 5X, with another similar photo taken with my Olympus gear, two weeks earlier:

End of the Res Olympus

You can see how the trees have lost most of their color, but despite that, and despite the first photo being from a "lowly" cell phone, the Nexus 5X image could easily be considered the better image.

Res Blue on Blue

Autumn Clouds

Sunset Over Gravestones

Birch Protector

Red Lock