Posts Tagged ‘iPhone camera’
Phone Photos
Nothing fancy. Just monkeying around a little with my iPhone to see what results I could achieve. It took me a little assistance from Cyndie to ultimately enact the instructions I had found in an internet search. Given my fading visual clarity, despite the help of glasses, I rarely know if images get close to matching what I was looking at until I am able to see them on a computer screen.
These shots of our little windmill at the top of the stairs going down to the beach came out looking a little AI-generated after testing out optional settings available with “live” images.
I had tried out the “portrait” mode while the blades were spinning. If you observe closely, the wire ring disappears between some of the blades.
Here it is again, after moving the focus more to the fin on the rear:
Now the blades look really funky.
Finally, I achieved the longer exposure that revealed the blades were really spinning in the warm summer breeze.
If I ever bothered to use a real camera, I might surprise myself with some more professional-looking results. For now, the convenience of messing around with the phone usually available in a pocket serves me well enough.
Here are some other shots, ala my filled-frame styling, that I captured during yesterday’s brief shooting spree:
It took us until late afternoon yesterday to learn there had been tornadoes from strong overnight thunderstorms close to our old Eden Prairie stomping grounds southwest of the Twin Cities in the middle of the night Saturday night. All of the friends we checked on had experienced the drama, but luckily didn’t suffer any serious damage. The report from our Wintervale sitters was of just drama-free rain. I say, “Phew!” to that!
I was awoken in the wee hours up at the lake place by bright flashes of lightning that I observed through one briefly opened eye, and at least one seriously loud thunder boom that startled me before quickly returning to the deep sleep from which I had been wrenched. Things just looked a little damp by daylight, but our surroundings were no worse for wear.
Highlights of the quiet Sunday at the lake included reading on the beach for a spell and crashing on the couch in the sunroom for a scrumptiously delicious mid-afternoon nap. Minimum exertion was the order of my day. Pulling out my phone to take a few pictures was about as industrious as I got. Looking back, I don’t think I even exhausted any mental effort worth mentioning. Obviously, I find it worth mentioning that my brain was in vacation mode autopilot, but you probably already picked up on that a couple of paragraphs ago.
Happy last day of June 2025, everyone!
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Fascinating Results
My exercise of mulling ideas over in my head for days on end brought me to a lightbulb moment when contemplating how a shade sail might work for our horses in the small paddock. How might I simulate what it will look like in order to figure out an optimal size and location? In my head, I’ve been troubling over the lack of a single defined parameter. Too many moving parts.
To figure out the size of the sail needed, measure precisely between the posts. There are no posts yet.
To figure out where the posts should be, calculate it from the size of the sail. I don’t have a sail size determined.
Lightbulb moment: My son, Julian, has done some 3D simulations of spaces. What if…?
He knew right away I would be surprised by the possibilities available in the supercomputer I carry around in my pocket. He pointed me to an app that collects LiDAR scans via the camera in my iPhone.
Having zero familiarity with the operation of the app features, I clumsily made a first attempt at collecting a scan Julian could use to then add a simulated sail canopy. I collected a 3D image of the paddock and sent it to him.
That didn’t work for what we were trying to do.
He was able to point me to the preferred settings to scan the environment with LiDAR. With no experience, I walked back and forth to collect enough of the small paddock to encompass the area I hope to shade. Mia was at the waterer, so I tried including her in the scan, but she kept turning to see what I was doing. It barely picked up the vague shape of a horse.
Far from perfect, it worked well enough for our purposes. I shared the image to Julian’s email, and he was able to take the file and add the rough geometry of a shade structure with controls to move the orientation of the virtual sun and see where the shadow would end up.
Brilliant! And fascinating! Since we got this far after such a short time, I asked if he could twist the position of the shade structure to align better with my current thinking about location. Julian asked if there were any other changes to include while he was at it. Well, as long as he asked…
I sent him several images of the types of shade sails I’m considering to see if he could more closely match the shape. He asked about color, and I chose a green like the barn and hay shed roofs.
In less than 24 hours, we had a mockup that blows my mind. There are keyboard controls that allow movement of the size and position of the sail, adjustment of the viewing angle, and moving the direction of the sunlight.
From the phone in my pocket and his experience with 3D software, we have a visual of what was in my head.
That wasn’t just a lightbulb moment I had. It was a lightning bolt!
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Spidey Senses
If I were more industrious about capturing snapshots of the endless number of spiderwebs we encounter this time of year, I might luck out and do one of them justice. Alas, I find myself lamenting the shortcomings of my undisciplined methods when we happen upon a most spectacular specimen of a web but cannot get the iPhone camera I’m carrying to pick up the detail of light reflecting off the individual strands of silk.
Nothing I capture with a lens can compare to the real-life stereo-vision image that my eyes and head movement provide.
The time I came upon a small leaf that appeared to hover in the air on a single line of silk across one of our trails, I had to resort to recording a video and moving the phone around to show the leaf was “magically” floating in the air.
I took a crack at this web on the side of the barn because the lines reaching out to the ground were particularly interesting.
I ended up liking this picture more for the angle of the fence and background field, trees, and sky, and how they contrast with the repeating lines in the metal siding of the barn.
Still, I gave another try to get those strands to the ground.
Just doesn’t come close to what I was seeing with my eyes.
I sure hope all the spiders are feasting on flies around the barn. We are definitely noticing the lack of free-ranging chickens around here by way of the increased amount of nuisance insects since we paused keeping hens.
August isn’t over yet and here I am yearning for a good hard frost to kick off the season without irritating flies and mosquitos. A momentary lapse in my being fully present in the moment.
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Trickster Fox
We are now in our 11th year living on this rural property and yesterday was the first time I finally saw the local fox with my own two eyes. The first year, contractors were showing up regularly to work on fencing and building the hay shed. One of the guys would tell me he saw a fox on our driveway every morning as he arrived.
Two years ago, the guy we hired to seal the logs of our house caught the fox trying to take one of our chickens and chased it off, screaming and hollering like a wild man.
I captured the fox on our trail cam back in 2018.
Delilah and I tried to track that fox through the snow into our neighbor’s woods that time but the trail led to a junction that looked like Grand Central Station and the multitude of alternative routes was more than we could follow.
Until yesterday morning, I had never set eyes upon the cunning critter. There I was, standing in our sunroom, stepping into my treasured Carhartt insulated bib overalls when I noticed something moving in the neighbor’s field, coming our way. As soon as I recognized it to be the fox, I pulled out my phone to take a picture.
The camera wouldn’t focus. It kept oscillating in and out of focus. The fox was coming right into the yard. I switched to video in an attempt to at least record some blurry movement as the fox walked past the windows of the sunroom. When I looked at the screen while the phone was supposed to be recording, the fox wasn’t showing up at all in the oscillating focus. I wondered if it was because I was trying to shoot through the window.
There is no recording for proof of what I saw. This fox must have magical powers that messed up the camera app on my phone. Now with no fox around, the camera works just fine.
I’m under the impression that the absence of our dog, Delilah, has given the fox confidence to walk right in front of me as if I wasn’t there. That’s okay. I don’t mind seeing him or her now that I know there will be no chickens harmed on our property.
I’ll even celebrate the visits if the little trickster will do something to reduce the number of gopher and mole tunnels that are taking over our turf.
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Split Seconds
Who knows what’s going to happen in any given second? In this case, my phone decided to capture an image of falling from my hands.
I like it.
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Partly Smoky
Cyndie and I drove up to the lake last night. It was a long day in a car for her, because she started the day yesterday up at the lake. She had gone up on Wednesday with Melissa and daughters, in an original plan to have me drive up to join them Thursday night, but that changed when a memorial for Charlie Weller was announced for Friday.
Charlie was the husband of Cyndie’s close high school friend, LuAnn (Miller). The revised plan had Cyndie riding home with Melissa and the girls yesterday afternoon, taking a moment to freshen up from beachwear to something more appropriate, driving us through afternoon traffic to Eden Prairie from our house, and then heading back to the lake from there, after paying our respects.
LuAnn and Charlie were dating in high school, not long after Cyndie and I had begun our relationship, so my memories of Charlie are wrapped in fragments of events that I haven’t thought about in decades. Even driving on roads in Eden Prairie, now approaching only six years distant from when I drove them almost every day, was feeling a little fractured.
I had to ask if we turned right or left at the intersection by the House of Kai restaurant to get to the funeral home.
In our haste to pull off this plan, we left out one pertinent aspect of determining the optimal route back to northwestern Wisconsin. I was tempted to try the old way we always drove when our kids were little and we regularly made the trip on back roads, but construction and traffic made the city portion an unwanted annoyance.
We paused for dinner at Jake’s to give traffic more time to thin out.
In the end, we chose to skirt the metro area on 494 and head up toward Stillwater to cross into Wisconsin on the new bridge. The resulting country roads we picked provided a rich reward of light traffic, gorgeous rolling hills and spectacular scenery.
We chuckled over the MPR radio weather forecast of “partly smoky” from the many fires burning out west, but when changing stations to our old favorite WOJB as we got far enough north, we heard the same phrase used again. Maybe it is an actual authorized weather service term.
It sure made an impact on the setting sun. It was looking dusky a lot earlier than the actual time of sunset. I held up my phone through the open top of Cyndie’s convertible at 7:52 p.m. and experimented with capturing it at 60 miles an hour.
Then I tried zooming in. It looked like a cartoon drawing of the sun.
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The optics of my iPhone seem to have added special effects without my input. Yes, that’s the sun glowing through the smoky sky.
Between the funky looking sun, my grasping at recollections of interactions with LuAnn and Charlie back in the 1970s, and finally, unexpectedly stumbling upon a portion of our old back roads route, but from a different point, my mind was feeling partly smoky.
“We’ve been here before…”
Yes, we have.
And now we are up at the lake again this weekend.
Ahhhhh. I remember this.
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Relative Something 