iPhone7

COVID-19 Signage Project: Changes to Normal Operations

 
Sign in plastic vertical sign holder on a counter: "NOTICE PRODUCT TASTINGS ARE SUSPENDED INDEFINITELY." Store magazine titled *Taste* on counter in front of the sign.

May 28, 2021
Fine Wine and Good Spirits
Southridge Plaza, State College, PA
iPhone 7

Sign in produce section of a grocery store: IN ORDER TO MAINTAIN PROPER SOCIAL DISTANCING, WE ASK THAT YOU DO NOT SHUCK YOUR CORN IN-STORE. THANK YOU FOR YOUR UNDERSTANDING.

September 3, 2021
Weis Markets
Bellefonte, PA
iPhone 12 Mini

Pharmacy counter with two containers of pens (repurposed orange pill canisters). Left container labeled CLEAN PENS. Right container labeled USED PENS.

October 27, 2022
Weis Markets
Bellefonte, PA
iPhone 12 Mini

Printed sign taped to the front of a shelf of toys: Kid to Kid FOR YOUR SAFETY Do not allow children to touch the toys unless you are ready to purchase. We know that's hard and we're sorry. Let's stay healthy!

December 18, 2021
Kid to Kid
State College, PA
iPhone 12 Mini

Printed sign affixed to a brushed metal plate: To help decrease the spread of COVID-19, the water fountains in our stores have been turned off. Sorry for the inconvenience. Bottled Water is available to buy at the Restaurant and Bistro. Ikea logo.

October 16, 2021
Ikea
Conshohocken, PA
iPhone 12 Mini

This set took me a while to finish posting, but I finally got there. It's partly due to time constraints—I post another picture into a set when I get a free moment, and as brief as it may take to post a photo, write caption info + ALT text, and share it on a few platforms, time's been in short supply lately.

A quirk of this particular set, too, is that what I'd originally classified as "Changes to Normal Business Operations" previously included signs with now enough fellows to fit into posts and categories of their own, to be posted later, including in particular Staffing and Supply Chain-related signage.

One of my models for this project, Neil Kramer's Quarantine in Queens, seems to be nearing its end, though my own (while not nearly as prolific) is likely to continue for some time. Part of this is, once again, due to time constraints—I have many more sets of photos collected that I have yet to post.

Part of it, too, is the lingering nature of signage. It ages over time and shows that age, and depending on the particular one, it's also likely to just continue to hang out there.

These particular signs are probably the outliers—I think the water fountains at Ikea are running again, you can pick up the toys at Kid2Kid, and as far as I recall, corn shucking at Weis is once again permitted.

The ones that seem likeliest to linger are the floor markers. I continue to see them, though I think they're much less frequently adhered to than they were a few years ago.

Trying out iPhone raw shooting and editing with Lightroom for mobile

 

On Vanderbilt Avenue

Apple recently released an API allowing third party apps to edit "raw" iPhone camera images. In short (and I'm sure at some level I'm butchering this summary), raw editing gives you a lot more room to edit an image's color and exposure. To my eye, the benefits of this are most evident in highlights and shadows. Parts of an image that appear to be blown out in white can be pulled back to show details, and parts of an image that appear to be blackened shadows can be pulled up to show what's there.

I saw that Adobe Lightroom for mobile was highly recommended for trying this out, so I downloaded it earlier this week and took it for a spin. It'll prompt you to sign up for a membership, but you actually don't need to in order to be able to shoot and edit with it.

On 42nd Street (East)

These shots are mostly from around the neighborhood where I work. I tried to keep an eye out for high contrast scenes that could most benefit from raw editing.

Street Crossing

A nice bonus from this experiment was trying out Lightroom for mobile. I had never used it before, but found the interface very easy to use. I think it's going to be my photo editor of choice for times when I want to get a little deeper than what Instagram will let me do.

On 42nd Street (West)

One thought that occurred to me was whether or not raw editing provided an advantage over the iPhone's built-in HDR feature when it comes to dealing with high contrast scenes. I didn't side-by-side this, so it's tough to know, but the answer is probably "it depends". iPhone Life's piece on HDR notes that HDR is not the best tool for capturing shots with lots of motion, since it's knitting together multiple exposures. So in something like the above, where there are people going back and forth, the exposures could overlap poorly and there might be some blur or strange artifacts in the final image.

Morning on Ditmars Boulevard

Parts of the clouds still blow out here, and the vignette I added certainly crunches down the shadows along the edges. But as always on the phone, it's a balance between how much editing work I want to do, and how much time I want to spend on my phone doing it. There's still an "ok, that's good enough" point, and this was it for me with this photo.

Street Crossing on East 42nd

Stitch Bar & Lounge

There's some blurriness here, as the phone's probably taking a longer exposure and I could've done a better job bracing it against the balcony rail.

Overall, I found raw/Lightroom a useful tool, though not one that I'll use every for every iPhone photo. In a lot of scenarios, the built-in Camera app is going to be good enough, and that's faster for me to start up than opening Lightroom and then going to the camera part of the app. I also don't want to get into the habit of building up a large backlog of unedited raw files in the app, as I have enough of that going on in my non-iPhone photo world.

But for times when I'm taking a shot that I know I'm going to want to post, and I want the best version available for editing, then I'll most likely be using this to do it.

iPhone 7 series

 

Every now and then, Timehop will show me a photo I took on my phone five or six years ago. Sometimes I'll be able to remember what in the scene made me take it. I imagine my past self swiping through Instagram filters, finding one that had that "something" and feeling pretty happy with the end result. But looking down at the photo now on a retina display phone, the limitations of the old hardware are evident. There's muddled looking contrast and unsightly digital grain, only slightly disguised by the kitschy filter.

I probably would have a hard time telling the difference between a photo taken on an iPhone 6S and a photo taken on an iPhone 7 (not counting the 7+'s fancy Portrait setting). But these cameras do get incrementally better every year, and per my Timehop example, those improvements are even more evident when skipping generations. So for me, the 5s to the 7 is a big jump.

It would be difficult for me to pinpoint just how much better the 7 is than the 5s short of doing shot by shot comparisons, which would likely drive me bananas. So instead I figured I would instead actively shoot and post on the 7 over the course of a week and see how I felt at the end of it.

For this post, I tried to focus on subjects that would typically catch my attention on the street, as well as a few that might be good for showcasing the new camera (such as the flowers and produce below). As an experiment, I edited in the Photos app rather than Instagram. I'm not in love with the Photos app's editing interface. I like the attempt at simplicity with the master Light and Color sliders, but I found myself almost always digging into the subsliders anyway, which makes for a lot of expanding and collapsing of menus. Things would also often get cumbersome after I cropped an image: I would crop it, and then the image would automatically expand under the top and bottom control bars to the edges of the display. So I'd have to tap the image again so that the bars would disappear and I could see the whole thing. Still, every now and then it's good to shake loose of old habits, so I like to think it pushed me to be a little more purposeful in my edits instead of following my rote Instagram editing routines.

Overall, I'm very happy with how these came out. As has always been the case with phones in recent years, in good conditions, the camera on your phone will do a great job. In more challenging conditions, like nighttime on the street or high contrast environments, things get trickier. But even then I still think they came out well. Rarely did I take a shot that I felt was unusable because of the quality of the image (i.e. it's not you, phone; it's me).

Two other neat things, apparently iOS 10 now allows you to shoot in RAW on third party apps. The f/1.8 aperture is also a nice improvement. I could imagine using a third party app to shoot in aperture priority and attempt to squeeze some nicely bokehed shots out of it. But digging into these features does run counter to the sense of simplicity that I've enjoyed while shooting on my phone this week. I like that I can point my phone at something, take the photo, and feel alright about it, and move on. The fact that it's a phone lowers my expectations on what I ought to be trying to control.

I don't think the iPhone 7 quite beats my GR II, but sooner or later I imagine an iPhone will (just as how the iPhone 7 is likely now at parity, if not better than, my old S90). And of course, the biggest advantage that it has over my GR II or my DSLR is that it is always in my pocket. As photographer Chase Jarvis has said, "the best camera is the one you have with you".

But also, it doesn't hurt when that camera also happens to be really good.

Yellow

Taxi on Lexington Avenue

On Lexington Avenue, I'll often pull out my phone and try to grab panning shots of cars going by. So as the car comes up, I'll hit the shutter and attempt to move the phone in the same direction as the car while it passes. Hence the blurry background and less blurry car.

Vote Your Conscience

Saw this while I was walking through Noho. Did a quick Google search and found this info on it.

Cemetery

Main Concourse, Grand Central Terminal

This same shot, from the balcony of the Apple Store, is probably taken thousands upon thousands of times per day.

Strawberries

Bus Stop

43rd Street and Vanderbilt Avenue

This needs a bit more contrast, but I wasn't able to get it quite right.

Sunset

Barber Shop

I really like how the contrast between the cool florescent lights inside and the red neon on the edge of the window. The operator error here, though, is that I think this ought to be a straight shot of the window, with the neon lights lining up with the edges of the photo. I grabbed this as I was walking by, though, and I thought backing up to take that straight shot might be a bit too obvious or awkward with the people right inside.

Under Construction

Again, needs more contrast. This might be due to a filter effect that I applied.

Grapes

Urbanspace Vanderbilt

This was shot using the Panorama setting. I haven't used Panorama much before, mostly because my old phone was always nearly out of storage.

Always On

For shots of people on the street, I've found that using the volume button as the shutter works best. It's a little less obvious than pressing my thumb to the screen. Also, since the volume button is a physical button, I can keep my thumb on it while looking ahead. The iPhone 7 has image stabilization that supposed to help with blur at low shudder speeds. When shooting like this, though, I'll inevitably get one good shot out of every 10 or more, since usually both myself and my subjects are in motion.

1

This seems like a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. On the one hand, you don't want to have piss or shit on your doorstep. On the other, having signs and depictions of pissing and shitting on the front of your house probably isn't a great feeling either.

At The Strand

No Trespassing Beyond This Point

Trespass to here; no farther.

Looking

Union Square Park