Commodity lenses for mobile phones

I have a rather nice, if old, Samsung camera. It weighs a kilo and has a long adjustable lense that cannot be changed. It takes quite ok photos, though the macro is hardly macro at all. I don't like to carry the camera along on trips and hikes etc. so lately I've either borrowed my teen's small but excellent Nicon or made do with the iPhone camera.

Some time ago I learned about these extra lenses you can get for your cellphone camera. I even tried a few, that my co-worker had bought and brought to the office to show them to us. A few weeks ago I finally decided, on a whim as usual, to order some lenses from Amazon. I got a 12X Optical Phone Camera Lens with Tripod and a CamKix Universal 3 in 1 Camera Lens Kit. Yes, I got them separately, because at first I only was going to buy the zoom lense, and only later decided on the lense kit.

The main things I have come to understand about the lenses are

• the macro lense rocks
• the 12x zoom lense is no good without the tripod or with a target that moves even a hair
• daylight is a must
• they will never replace the mentioned Samsung/Nicon cameras, because setting them on the phone camera is not exactly easy to do on the fly

This said, I'm not sorry I bought them, especially the macro lense and the 12x zoom, which I believe will prove to be excellent for certain types of photoshoots. The picture quality is rather good for a phone camera + small lense combo. Yet, on a hike or trip, I fear I will still be carrying a separate camera.

In the case of cameras and lenses, I guess pictures tell the story better than a thousand words.

12x zoom lense. Littlest Pet Shop photoshoot. Photoshopped ever so slightly: simply adjusted the levels and curves a bit (winter photography...).

12x zoom lense. Littlest Pet Shop photoshoot. Photoshopped ever so slightly: simply adjusted the levels and curves a bit. Taken without the tripod, actually.

12x zoom lense. Taken with tripod, slightly moving objects.

Macro lense. Thyme leaf (width approx. 5mm). Daylight, but taken inside the house.

Wide angle lense (top) vs. phone cam without any extra lense (bottom). Poor daylight inside the house, levels and curves adjusted slightly in Photoshop.

Fish eye lense. Don't really know what to do with that one...

Agravating Photo Sync

After getting the camera kit for my iPad, I have happily been mostly juggling my photos via the iPad. So convenient to be using a little bit of PhotoShop Express to enhance some pics and creating some nice collages with e.g. PicCollage or InstaCollage and then using them in blogs, uploading to Flickr etc. iPad has all the right apps for all that activity (minus the adding videos to blog posts in Blogsy...).

My active photographing - whether it be with my proper Samsung or my Lumia, which I have been using increasingly lately since it's so readily available in all situations - and fiddling with the photos in different apps for different purposes, results in approx. 10000 photos a year (and this was the case even before the iPad...). Which means that my iPad quite frequently is running out of space and I need to delete some photos - ok, a lot!

But never before copying them to my hard drive, of course. Usually, I have done this via iCloud and my photostream. But the iCloud has a mind of its own, and I cannot control what is in the photostream and what is not and what and when is available on my laptop. And this agravates me big time. At least when it is not doing what I expect it to do.

I have accepted, that it has its own operation queues and my photos are not necessarily available on my laptop immediately (or even almost) after taking them (unlike e.g. the autoupload to OneDrive from my Lumia). Mostly, I can live with that, for be as it may, mostly, the photos have been available at some point. At least on my work laptop. For whatever mysterious reason, the photostream mostly refuses to sync itself on my personal laptop.

A few weeks ago, after having been on sick leave for several weeks, I opened my work laptop to do some of this photo transferring. But the iCloud would not sync. Eventually, I disabled and enabled the whole iCloud sync, and, well, it synced. but not the whole 1000 photos as it should. Now I have 300 photos in my photostream and a couple months missing from both the stream and my hard drive. And iCloud will not sync them - nor the newer photos again...

So, yey, I had two options:
1) connect my iPad to my laptop and fiddle with iTunes or
2) copy photos to Dropbox on iPad and then transfer them from Dropbox to hard disc on laptop

Guess which one I went for? Did I ever mention that I hate iTunes and all the other similar apps that are meant for convenient backupping etc. of the devices, but seem to do whatever they please instead of letting me be in control, and have a confusing UI & UX on top of it? Yeah, I added approx. 800 photos to Dropbox. 670 remaining to be uploaded. We could have a faster wi-fi, you know.

I would be cool to be able to connect the usb hard drive straight to the iPad. And it would be cool to have a working cloud sync. OneDrive offer autoupload of the iPad camera roll nowadays too, did you know that? But it still does not include th camera uploads from my Smasungs to the iPad, and some app-modified pics either. In many ways, the logic of what is in "photos", what in "camera roll", whart in "photostream" and how all of these are linked and cloud synced, is still a total mystery to me on the iPad.

Upgrading to Lumia 820

Last week I grabbed the opportunity to upgrade my phone (at least for the time being) from that faithful snowwhite Lumia 800 that's accompanied me to so much, and taken a *few* hits along the way to a new white Lumia 820. Oh, I know it's not a new model anymore, and that there're newer Nokias available, and that it's not high-end, and that there's newer iPhones availble too. But I like the Lumias, and I like the smaller size phones, and as a phone user, I'm not really that demanding.

I think I have listed before the features I most use on a phone (apart of using it as a phone and for texting), but let's approach the Lumia 820 from this point of view. What do I expcect from and appreciate in a phone, and how does the Lumia 820 meet those.

• Email. No matter how much the media shouts that email is sooo last year because of Lync and Skype and whatnot, it's not. I love both and more, but I could not imagine working in a way where customers Lync m every time they have something to ask or say. Seriously! I need my peace to work. Email gives me the freedom to react when the time's right for me. And it may be in the bus or on the lake side or the sofa in between two episodes of Breaking Bad. And that goes for personal email too. I don't think I need to be available 24/7 - and besides, people can always call me.

As for Lumia 820, it meets my requirements as well as any current smartphone. Nothing new, but then again, no bigger needs either, than to be able to read and reply, search and sync. And I like it that the WinPhones separate different email accounts by deafult, unlike e.g. the iPad.

• Calendar. I'd be lost without it! I use only one calendar, the Outlook one on the company Exchange server. I use it for work stuff and personal stuff alike. No matter how well Googles and Hotmails and whatnot claim to be able to merge their calendars on different devices into only one, I have realized that for me, this is the only real option in order to keep my mind from being scattered.

Lumia (either one) actuallky would handle the merging ok, but I still want only one calendar. And that is just fine by the phone too ;)

• Camera. I have a semi-proper camera I use mostly. A Samsung Pro with an ok lense and possibilities for quite ok photos (yes, I'd like a better one, but it's on the very bottom of the priority list of things I'd need or want, because it still works ok for my purposes). And I have a pocked model, some years old cheapie I got in the middle of my divorce, just to have something. That one I use quite rarely. Even more so, since the phone cameras are now more or less as good.

The camera is one of the best features in Lumia 820. It comes with a high-res 8MP camera with focus assist light (a feature well appreaciated by me, for it enalbes taking good quality photos in lesser light without needing to use the flash), options to select the ISO and choose between 16:9 or 4:3 aspect ratio and a few other settings. For a more detailed review, see this TechRadar article about Lumia 820 camera.

Lumia 820 also has an inbuilt (or downloadable, but at least for me, they were readily available) set of different photo lenses, or apps, such as the Nokia Panorama which proved to be a pretty able panorama photo app, Nokia Cinemagraph for creating animated photos (but I think you can only see the effects in the app, not elsewhere) and Nokia Smartcam, with fun effects for capturing movement and then applying one of several ways of handling it, e.g. removing a moving object, or overlapping the frames.

And you can download plenty more.

• Skype and WhatsApp. I don't launch Lync on my phone almost ever, but I do use Skype on my phone occasionally (my mother lives on the other side of the world) and WhatsApp is the messaging app of choice for my daughters, ever since they had an almost 100€ SMS bill. So I, too, started using it with them, and a few others as well.

As for WhatsApp, it's just WhatsApp. But as for Skype, Lumia 820 has a front camera unlike the 800. And the incoming video was clear and sharp, unlike on ANY other device I've skyped on before!

• News, both tech and world&local. I used to use Pulse on my phone, for lack of Flipboard. For quite some time now, the phone usage for news has been very rare, for I've used the combination of my iPad and the phone internet sharing in the morning bus. So last time I tried to read the tech news on my phone, I realized there was no Pulse no more. I downloaded Tech News Now app, and actually like it better. Also, I read the local news on Hesari app, and world news in Google news, using the browser.

Lumia 820? Not much difference, naturally. Except for the bigger screen, while the phone is still sleek.

• OneNote, Googling, Kindle, occasional Youtube, Facebook, Twitter... Apps, apps, apps. Apart from the bigger screen, nothing special about Lumia 820 for those.

Conclusion? I fell in love with the clear a bit bigger screen and the camera - all the while understanding that there are even better ones availbale. I like the little niche feature improvements of WinPhone8 compared to 7.8. Mostly just more options in the settings and such. Oh, and the possibility to use removable storage! Which brings me to my first frustrating encounter with the phone: I needed to refer to the manual to understand where to insert the SIM; you actually need to take the back cover (and the battery) off.

 

Article: Who Owns Your Photos?

You ask me, this world has gone crazy. It used to be that any photographer had the rights to his own photos, but now services like Instagram and Facebook (albeit the same company now, of course) suddenly claim (ok, not so suddenly for Facebook) ownership or at least rights to sell and to lease your photos with not so much as a notice, let alone payment!

Am I the only one thnking that there's something seriously wrong with this picture? Surely not! Governments and different instances fight against piracy and network distribution in the name of royalty payments to a degree that is all but ridiculous. Where are those governments and instances when a big company stomps on the rights of small people? Gaining money from the activity, possibly? For all I understand, Facebook's way of claiming posession of (public) photos in its services is anything but legal in most countries in this world.

But I guess there's as many ways to interpret the law as there are the Bible. If I had an Instagram account, I would have already deleted it after migrating my photos to Flickr.


Instagram says it now has the right to sell your photos
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57559710-38/instagram-says-it-now-has-the-right-to-sell-your-photos/




****

Edit Dec.19, 2012

Of course, you may want to believe it was a misunderstanding and give Instagram a second chance. Personally, I wouldn't.

Tweak Your Photos on Windows8

In my previous review of Windows 8 I was all but complaining about the lack of a proper(ish) tool for editing images. Naturally, the solution for this, too, is an app. Or several, if you wish. There's a multitude of different photo apps in the app store, but my pick was the PhotoStudio FREE. As its name suggests, it is a free photo studio, but so far I have been rather happy with it and could encourage the creators of it to make a paid version with more stuff; at least I would buy it.

Even now, though, in addition to the basic correction tools, the PhotoStudio has a rather nice set of filters effects and frames to select from:

So, e.g. after selecting all these (a little bit too many, but all for the sake of demo) effects and such, with a little bit of additional corrections, such as color and hue manipulation

my photo got a whole new look:

Now, if I would want to create a multitude of photos with the same enhancements, this app also allows the user to save and apply action sets.

All in all, I'm quite happy with the app. The next thing on my wishlist for Win8 is a pic collage app!

Picture Collages

I love to take pictures. I love to fiddle with them, e.g. modify them in iPhoto, Photoshop (Express), the Win Live Gallery etc. I love to make some collection things, like using the iPhoto Journal. Yesterday I found a nice new toy for this, the PicCollage app for iPad. You can add photos from the photo galleries, from the internet or Facebook, and you can add text and some "stickers", like ClipArt. You can clip pics and edit them in different ways.

Such a cool app!