It was a great run! Now that I have the iPhone 5 (see my iPhone 5 review here), this trusty iPhone 4—which still looks and runs perfect—is going to be passed along to some other owner. What an iconic and well-crafted product:
Read my review of the iPhone 4, from 2010.
I recently told my Facebook friends that I was thinking of writing a book to help people get better photos with their fancy cameras, and received a lot of positive feedback.
Getting consistently sharp, vivid, interesting photos doesn't have to be hard.
Some of the things I want to write about include:
I don't want to be technical in this book, other than introducing people, slowly, to important concepts in photography. I want to show people through example and experience exactly what's going on when they snap a picture that they later find to be ugly, horrible, or too blurry or bright/dark to use.
One of my photos is being shared around Facebook with the tagline #OccupyAdoration, shared originally by the Peoria Young Catholics Facebook Page:
They did ask permission for using the photo, which was good of them; I've seen some of my photos pop up on websites, some videos, and even a textbook without my permission :-/
Here's the original picture on Flickr.
While I'm no great fan of the #occupy movement, I wholeheartedly agree that occupying your local Eucharistic Adoration chapel would be a very worthy cause. Save your own soul, and save the world!
Found in the memory archive:
...and we now get hundreds of 'electronic letters' a day. Ick. (From a Science Encyclopedia I devoured over and over as a kid).
I took this photo from the ground at Willis Tower (formerly Sears Tower) in Chicago, IL over the weekend. I also took a bunch of HD videos from the SkyDeck that I'll be putting together into a few minutes of video. Truly a majestic building, and I wonder if we'll ever see something taller in the U.S. Seems our architectural prowess is taking a back seat to the rest of the world lately.
As an aside, if the iPhone 4 takes pictures of this quality, I can't wait to get an iPhone 4S and ditch my Nikon D7000 for many of my trips. While using a 50mm f/1.4 inside in a dim room and still getting nice shots is awesome, having a camera that's always with me and gets 'pretty good' shots is also awesome. I hope to get a 4S soon!
During part of a driving tour of ancient Rome this year, our (my wife's and my) tour guide drove us to a small courtyard on one of the hills near the Colosseum. As he parked the car, I noticed two rather serious looking militia with automatic weapons standing in the courtyard—and I hoped they weren't there for me! They had their fingers over the triggers the whole time I was there, though they seemed friendly enough as we passed by on our way to a mysterious door.
The tour guide told us that there was a delightful treat waiting for us; he told us to look into a small keyhole, not a half inch in diameter, and see what we could see. It was obvious many people had touched the door around the keyhole, so it had to be a somewhat popular thing to do.
My own suspicions made me hesitate from putting my eye to the hole—whenever I'm told to do something touristy, like rub the belly of a bronze Billiken statue, I remember what college kids did to such statues—but when my eye came into focus, I saw a brilliant and beautiful sight. A sight that cannot be adequately captured by a camera:
Photo taken with my iPhone 4 while travelling down historic route 66.
I was in a small group with Thomas Peters, @applemachome, @aquinasnmore and a few other awesome attendees at this year's CNMC breakout session #2:
Expect a wrap-up post for this year's CNMC sometime tomorrow, or maybe Monday.
Here's an older shot from my previous setup at home (much has changed since then... but most things are the same—in principle! The core tenets of a Geerling computer workstation are:
It's always exciting to be a St. Louisan in the springtime. God puts on a very nice show about two times a week; right now I'm staring outside the window at some of the most beautiful lightning strikes I've seen in a storm! I'm also thankful I'm not in the crazy rain.
