Local Flavor: I've Rejoined the Present

Above is a shot of our local Vermont Verde Antique marble quarry.

If you've got sharp eyes, you may have noticed the contact phone number has changed on the banner at the top of the site. Yes, I've finally got a cell again -- and can now understand how all you folks stay in the loop much better than without one. These things are practically Star Trek, now.

The last time I used one seriously at all was in 2007 -- right before we moved-up here. The service where we live/work is blocked by land features and so we went without one for a long time. The year before last I finally added service for an old phone just to have it while traveling, but over the holidays AT&T finally enabled wifi calling for our plan. Took them long enough, huh?

Anyhow, this fancy new iPhone solves the problem of the kids thieving the iPad Pro full-time for school and drawing (I was doing video with it in the shop -- it's too much trouble to hook my camera up and then have to export all sorts of nonsense just to get a clip up on YouTube) and also lets me finally get my business line away from our home/antique shop line.

Messages? You can see messages in a neat inbox and not have to click through some 1990s menu to hear garbled voices on those miserable VTech landline units? It's been a barrier, for sure. For the first time, that inbox is replied-to in full.

Yeah -- you can also text me, FaceTime/video me, get quick photos of work in progress if you need them, etc. etc. -- so have at it.

A side-benefit is that the video on this toy is excellent and the cameras are pretty impressive for tiny things, too. I've included some snaps from last week with it and at the end of this post I have a side-by-side with product shots from both my Fuji camera and this phone. The Fuji beats it out by a wide margin in archival terms, but just for sharing and printing at lower res... these toys are pretty good stuff.

Wide-angle of the same quarry...

The panorama shots stitch-together while you take them. Fast! I remember Photoshop taking an hour or longer to do this kind of stuff back in 2002-2005.

Just for fun -- here are some begonias Bonnie has in our window...

...and a shot that Elsa got of the cat as he was trying to run away from her. The caption should be, "Bonnie, have you seen the phone? I was answering about a Goya..." ...kids!

Yes, we're a reading family, for sure. This is only part of the kids' chapter-book bookshelf.

Now for a shootout -- first pic Fuji, 2nd pic iPhone Pro Max. The color and lighting adjustments are a little off (Fuji should be slightly brighter, iPhone a little less-bright) because I'm still getting used to adjusting around Apple's color profile -- which adapts more as you're shooting -- great for snaps but less-so for products.

I'm not sure which I like better at a glance. The iPhone photos have more depth of field -- but that's to be expected. They're also very "sharpened" digitally. We're comparing passion fruits to avocados, here. I've leaned-into the warmth in the Fuji pics, too, and probably a bit inaccurately -- but this is more how I feel like the instruments look in average indoor lighting.

It was a lot easier to get consistent results when editing across photos with the Fuji, though. If you're a pixel peeper, you will also notice that iPhone photos seem to be a lot more processed right out of the camera to achieve the results they do with such tiny sensors and lenses. I also notice -- right away -- that when I'm trying to compare focus and overall image quality in Lightroom, you can really see the limits of the smaller sensors when you're zoomed-in -- something I worry about for archival purposes when I'm older and, say, the modern spec for viewing is 10k instead of 5k... right?

There's a big difference between having a 26mp sensor and a 12mp sensor when it comes down to that. When I look back at the photos earlier-on in the blog that I took with -- frankly, not great equipment -- I sigh and wish I'd had the scratch to afford better cameras at the time.

I dunno how I feel -- but at least it was fun!