Sunday, November 1, 2015

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


All photos © 2015, all rights reserved.  Contact me for licensing or to order prints.

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Local Color on a Blue Sky Day

Given my last post, you might be wondering what the Res looks like on a blue sky autumn day? See the answer below. Hint: It looks like fall colors at their best.


Better than Silver Dollars





Tower of Color





 A Closer Look





Another Angle





Prime Colors





Reflections of Autumn





A Friend's Self-Built Rowboat... Nice Job, Jeff!





Mostly Yellow Forest Ceiling





Reflections Two





Water Colors




All photos © 2015, all rights reserved.  Contact me for licensing or to order prints.

Local Color

Not to be outdone by "Western MA", this post demonstrates that my usual hiking/walking spot for photos is no slouch when it comes to showing off local color.

Interestingly, these photos at the Ashland Res. were taken on a mostly cloudy day.


Leaves Everywhere





Even More Leaves Everywhere





A Bit of Blue





This Section of the Res is Separate from the Main Body of Water





Through the Trees One (crop of Two)

Through the Trees Two





Squiggly Branch





Wall of Yellow





Path Leaves





Another Wall of Yellow





Yellow Everywhere





End of the Res


All photos © 2015, all rights reserved.  Contact me for licensing or to order prints.

Amherst Campus

The Amherst area is host for five colleges.  Of these, I chose to spend some time at Amherst College itself.  This was my first visit and I came away impressed with the beauty of the campus and in the architecture of the buildings.  I try to capture that in these photos.

The Beneski Museum of Natural History really caught my eye.  I'm not usually an architecture buff, but I love the lines of this building.

Beneski Museum Lines





Campus Grounds





Clock Tower





Even Still Green Leaves Have Their Moment in the Sun





Amherst Town Hall





Soccer Practice





Architectural Shapes





Bricks and Shadows





Beneski Shines



All photos © 2015, all rights reserved.  Contact me for licensing or to order prints.

B&B Birds

We stayed at the Fox Crossing B&B while in Williamsburg. In addition to being a fantastic cook, the owner, Bobbie, has the most wonderful set of bird feeders on a high squirrel resistant pole, complete with a rope and pulley arrangement to lower the feeders down to replenish them. When Bobbie saw I was taking pictures, she lowered the feeders and put new seed in them. The birds, especially the chickadees, are not shy and stayed quite close; they knew exactly what was going on. I was able to get off a few shots of them while they waited for the feeders to be refilled.


Blue Jay Monitoring the Proceedings





Orange Overhead





Watching Me





Poser





Screen Shadow





Natural Surroundings





B&B View



All photos © 2015, all rights reserved.  Contact me for licensing or to order prints.