Snow day in Austin

Yesterday (02/24) Austin had a rare day of snow. I don't have class Tuesdays and Thursdays but I got wake-up calls from Julia and Naishadh about the snowfall. Heading to campus on the West Campus bus, I saw gaggles of students marveling at the snowflakes and having snowball fights. My d40 did its job for the better part of the day until moisture leaked into the directional pad, which caused it to go haywire- not letting me scroll through pictures or change the autofocus point in my viewfinder. Everything dried up just fine when I got home, though, so there's no permanent damage.

This was my first photo outing in a while and I am definitely rusty. It took me about half an hour to get my butt in gear. I was slow to track movement, being sluggish at making the necessary reactive adjustments to autofocus and metering. Composing felt forced and a little awkward. Also, my intuition about exposure was off and looking at my shots later, I found many of the under exposed.

Nevertheless, I had a blast, so I'll take this opportunity to regain my stride. Take a look at some of my favorites from yesterday.

Fish

My roommate's saltwater fish tank is very cool. He got the 55 gallon tank at the beginning of the fall 09 semester and has since spent thousands to equip, populate, and maintain it. Gotta love college businessmen and their disposable incomes...

First Day of Class | Spring 2010

...and my last semester here. Woah.



Gotta "do it big"
"put in some work"
"be real trill"
"get swoll body"
"lay some pipe game"

If none of that made any sense, don't worry. It took me a couple weeks to figure out what my roommates were saying half the time.

Merry Christmas

and a Happy New Year from the De Jesus family



A bit tardy, but hey, at least I'm updating, right?

Graduation Session

Jessica needed graduation/xmas pictures for her parents and I was happy to help. Here are some snaps from the shoot:









I'm hoping to start taking graduation pictures for my friends and peers at UT. It's my last semester at UT so I think that would be a fun thing to do. I could probably make a bit of money from it also. I'll keep you updated on developments.

Camera Phone?

Damn. That last post was a snoozer. I must have been REALLY bored the night I wrote it. I promise more ((interesting)) posts will start coming upon the arrival of the new semester.

New Years Resolution #123: Update blog with better posts.

Camera Phone

This is kind of a strange post for what should have been a semi-"serious" photo blog. I will post pictures I took off my phone. The only reason being is that I didn't pick up my real camera as often as I promised everyone this semester, and that I don't have much to show for myself except for these camera phone pictures. Sad, isn't it?



But I'll try to make this post productive by describing the limitations of the camera on my Samsung Impression, accompanied by relevant pictures. The images hereafter, I should let you know, have made the usual run through Lightroom 2.

The camera's exposure meter has 3 settings: Matrix, Center-Weighted, and Spot. From my experience, none of these settings behave the way they should. Center-weighted and Spot accurately meter only about 3/4 of the time, leaving me with many pictures that are either way underexposed or blown out. Matrix mode does the best job of reading exposure, but usually pictures with high contrast lighting come out a stop too bright. This snap was one of my preliminary experiments on how the camera would handle such a lighting situation:


Contrast isn't the best on the Samsung Impression, which is not unlike most other camera phones I've seen. But, in good lighting, or outdoors, the camera can put out some decent looking pictures with a fair bit of tonal depth. Keep in mind, again, that I ran this image through Lightroom (increased blacks), but this picture was a good example of nice contrast before I messed with it.


I think the best thing about this camera is the lens' surprising sharpness. In good light, the lens can swallow quite a bit of fine detail. Unfortunately, this sharpness means little in dim light or high contrast scenes, when the camera's shoddy metering usually under or over-exposes the scene. Nevertheless, bravo sharp lens:


Also, there's a fun panorama mode that I enjoy playing with when I'm bored:


The colors produced are vibrant and I'm relatively happy with them. However the camera introduces fairly random color casts on every picture, and there is no consistency between images. A scene taken outdoors in the sunlight will look magenta in one snap, and yellow in the next. There are no settings to change for white balance.



Overall, the camera kind of sucks. The metering is almost always wrong, contrast is normally flat, and scenes take on psychedelic colors at times. Also, the biggest drawback to this camera is the enormous amount of delay between when I press the shutter release, to when the camera takes the picture. It's a matter of about a 1/3 to 1/2 second delay! Forget sports photography with this phone. Usually what happens is I try to take a picture of someone doing something hilarious but end up getting the last hazy part of the moment.


However, I am glad to have a camera phone again, after having to use a backup phone for the first half of the year. I know it looks like I'm letting my photo hobby die off a little, but I still very much enjoy taking pictures for myself, albeit with a phone. This semester got a little crazier than I expected and my level of photography-laziness never dropped, thus I remained in my photo-hiatus for the semester. But I hope you will agree with me that these pictures and this post are the beginning of a new fervor and I do sincerely promise to keep posting and taking pictures. Thanks for reading.