This week...

 ...has mostly been about movement (I’ve covered over 70 miles walking & running this week!)  and finding my way round my new phone, or more specifically it’s camera. With my old iPhone SE being 4 years old, there have been huge advances in phone cameras since I bought last - not least in terms of the low-light capability...

Moot House - Harlow

It deals really well with both the bright doorway and the darker shadowed areas in the foreground and on the roof, neither blowing the highlights or losing the shadows, and replicating really well the colours present in the scene - it’s nice to find a mobile camera that doesn’t try to cancel out warm light in a shot.

There has been plenty of lovely warm autumn colours to try it out with too - this time of year our town really comes into its own with all the green spaces and planting turning to yellows, reds and oranges. 

I’ve picked up on a project I began some years ago again recently too - my other blog,  Recording Harlow which looks at the history of our town, and specifically what has changed over the years. Quite a bit of my walking this week has been around the various neighbourhoods searching for bits of history and also trying to capture more of the autumn colour where I can.  

We also have several areas of woodland scattered around the town - among them Brenthall and Barnsley Wood which forms the border between two of the newer housing developments on the east. At this time of year there seems to be fungi wherever you look in the woodlands - so a good opportunity to try out the camera’s close up capability too - and it’s no slouch! 

Another thing I have long envied those with newer phone cameras is their wide angle lenses - and the new iPhone doesn’t disappoint on that level either! There is a fair bit of distortion but then you expect that with this field of view...

Our Lady of Fatima Church 

...I’m certainly looking forward to playing with THAT setting in the Hebrides, it’s just meant for those wonderful landscapes! It’s certainly done justice to all the detail in our local Catholic church, above with good sharpness across the frame from spire to the intricately patterned brick wall. 

So far then, hugely impressed. Apple have gone over from giving us the option of using HDR mode (high dynamic range) to “auto HDR” which I confess made me slightly nervous as this is the sort of thing I’d usually rather have control over - however it’s a gentle touch that ensures that the detail in a bright yet overcast sky isn’t lost, and that colours are dealt with faithfully. Photographs from the iPhone 12 are mostly good to go straight from shooting from what I’ve seen so far, with less need of stand-alone processing apps to bring out the shadows and control the highlights. Depth of field is nice on close ups, and there is a portrait mode to create blurred backgrounds to help the subject stand out if required. I’ll be enjoying some more exploring to put it to the test even further this week, anyway! 

Robyn.