Traveling Without Photographing or Using the Camera in My Mobile Phone

Downtown Cleveland Ohio from the Rooftop Terrace of the Cleveland Clinic Medical Center

Last week, I spent the entire week at the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio.  The Cleveland Clinic is a world class medical facility which impressed me like no other.  I accompanied a relative who needed to travel the 530 miles from the area in which we live to Cleveland for tests and surgical consultations.  It was a long drive, but as you know, I like road trips.  I'm always looking for opportunities to wander around and look for images.  But not on this trip.  The object of this journey was not photography, but helping a relative deal with some serious medical issues.  I didn't anticipate that I would be making any images.

Did I go without photography gear?  Of course not.  I did take my travel kit which included my Olympus E-M1 and a few lenses.  My travel kit doesn't take up much space and will cover the majority of any photographic opportunities that may arise, if in fact, any do. Unfortunately, over the course of the entire trip, I didn't even get a chance to take my gear out of the bag.  But that was okay as photography was way down the priority list for me.  My focus was helping.

However, I do have a Samsung Galaxy Note 3, which has an 8mp camera.  I did have my phone with me at all times for communication purposes with the relative.

On one of the days, we found ourselves with a bit of time on our hands between appointments with surgeons.  We learned there was a rooftop patio on the main clinic building so we took the elevator to the top and enjoyed some time outdoors in the fresh air.  It was one of those nice early autumn days which feel so good after a hot summer.  We also enjoyed a very nice view of Cleveland.  Because the day was so nice, I decided to make an image of downtown Cleveland in the distance and used the camera in my mobile phone from the rooftop patio.  The patio was surrounded by thick safety glass, but I was able to rest the phone on the top edge to photograph over the glass. The top image is the best of the four exposures I made with the phone camera.

The image looks pretty good when looking at it when looking at it on a phone or computer screen when it is small in size.  However, when looking at it in Lightroom in the Develop Module at anything beyond screen size, it looks terrible.  This is a good example of why not to use your phone camera for anything but small snapshots or record shots.  This is a good example of why the best camera may NOT be the one that you have with you, as that erroneous phrase so states.  This image could have been edited to be very nice if the image file would have been of a much higher quality.  Eight megapixels is enough to make high quality images.  I  once had a Nikon D70 with 6mp, and made some beautiful 16" X 20" (40 X 50 cm) prints.  I would not make a print larger than 4" X 6" (10 X 15 cm) from the camera in this phone.

Below is a 100% crop from near the center of the image, which usually is the technically best part of an image.  You can see how the detail is smeared (in reality there is no fine detail) and looks like a watercolor painting.  The image is over compressed using Samsung's too aggressive jpeg algorithm in the phone and it is over-sharpened.  What a letdown.  I thought that the quality would be a bit better than this.  In the future, I will try to avoid using this phone camera for anything other than a device to make a record of something.  Certainly, it is not capable of producing pleasing art.

By the way, I used the app, Camera FV-5 for the image.  I don't know if what they inject into the process produced this mess or this is what comes out of the phone no matter what app is used.  I'm going to try some other camera apps to see if other do a better job.  As I said, 8mp should give me a very good looking file.

Same image.  100% crop from center.  No detail.  Looks like a watercolor painting!
Phone photography?  Not for me! (click to enlarge)

Lesson Learned:  Even if you are not out to primarily photograph, keep a decent camera with you at all times to create quality images and don't rely on a mobile phone camera for anything except basic record keeping.

Panasonic's and Canon's new introductions last week at Photokina appear to be about the best small cameras yet produced.  I plan on looking into purchasing one just to keep handy so I never have to rely on the camera in my mobile phone in the future.

Thanks for looking.  Enjoy!

Dennis Mook

Many of my images can be found at www.dennismook.com.  Please pay it a visit.  I add new images regularly.  Thank you.


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