}

Thursday, October 25, 2018

Just another Spring day


Today was an ordinary Spring day, and I decided to document a small part of it. The Instagram photo montage above is the result, and it also contained a trial. That’s an ordinary thing for me, too.

The caption tells the story of what the photos are about, and basically they document a specific part of my day (which also included lunch with my mother-in-law and a stop at the nearby location of the home centre where we got our tomato cages for this year, and I finally got the fourth one we needed).

The clouds were cloudy when we left, and there were some occasional sprinkles, but not much. As I drove back home to Auckland, the skies cleared as I sang a song about sunny days chasing the clouds away, which clearly was some sort of magic incantation. We gays control the weather, remember.

Anyway, at some point I wished I had a “dash cam” to show the pretty Waikato and Franklin District countryside I pass through. I don’t have one, but my phone was in a special cradle facing me, which meant its camera was facing the rod.

So, I woke up the phone with its camera and touched the shutter release button. I did all of this one-handed while watching the road, so I wasn’t even sure the camera was pointing in the right direction. Because it was positioned vertically, I knew I could crop out all the dashboard that I knew would be in the foreground.

I didn’t know how well it would handle the motion, but it actually did okay, though it was a little less focused that a regular photo would have been with the phone held still. But that also added some interest to some spots of the photo, I thought.

One thing I realised is that if I do that again, I should use the earbuds that came with the phone because it can be used as a shutter release cable. That would mean I wouldn’t have to reach over to the phone and risk bumping it, which moves it and changes what it’s pointed at. The camera would be more stable, in other words.

Using the camera to record video is much more problematic. The holder keeps the phone upright, not horizontal, which is what I would want. While I could set up some sort of rig to film horizontally, the better solution is to use a high resolution dashcam (as most are these days). We actually have one that’s not being used at the moment, and I may try that.

It was fun to experiment with something new, but I doubt I’ll do it again. If I do, I’ll have everything all set-up in advance. But today’s effort was spur of the moment, so it was what it was.

So, those photos were little bits of my day today, and one of them was a bit of an experiment. Basically, it was just another Spring day.

I like that.

1 comment:

rogerogreen said...

You CAGE your tomatoes? Are they vicious down under? Our tomatoes are free range.