Rick’s Rants and Raves

Due to changes in work policies (they no longer provide cell phones to critical employees, just a reimbursement) I was finally able to get a cell phone with a built in camera. My new phone is the fabulous LG Lotus. So far, I’ve been very pleased with it, and I’m very picky about my cell phone.

In addition to all kinds of nifty whiz bang features like a QWERTY keyboard, and MP3 playback, it also has a camera phone.

Yea, I know. EVERY phone has a camera in it nowadays. Well, every phone that’s any phone. I personally have never had a camera phone. Now most of you reading this know about my recent obsession with photography. So it is probably no surprise to you that I’m pretty excited about the idea of having a camera with me all the time. As they say, the best camera is the one you’ve got!

At some point I’m going to reverse engineer the camera portion by comparing it to the D60 (as a learning exercise for me). For now, I’m just going to post my first ever camera phone self portrait.

Yeah, I know. Not terribly imaginative. But hey, there I am.

Here are a couple more shots from our recent trip to Ikea. We had a decent digital camera with us, but I really wanted to experiment with the phone. Even though I carried the camera, I used my phone.

First up is a pic of a sign that I’ve always wanted to take a picture of. It is a billboard that has been along I-71 between Columbus and Cincinnati for years: “HELL IS REAL” I have no idea why just the H is red. I, personally, would have made the E and the L and L red as well. Yes, people really do believe this crap so fervently that they’ll spend money on signs like this. Anyway, that’s a different blog post all together.

Finally, this one is a bit more abstract, and it captured what I was hoping for–a self captioned photo.

The pictures aren’t great. It has a fixed shutter speed, aperture, and focus (none of which is surprising considering it has no moving parts) so all it can do to adjust for lighting conditions is to adjust ISO. Well lit shots look pretty decent. Everything else is, well, noisy.