This is one of my favorite views at Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge, along the short headquarter’s loop of trial. It overlooks the Merriland River, which becomes the Little River for the rest of it’s run t the sea, just beyond those ponds where Branch Brook joins it on the left. The view is exceptional in every season. If you pursue my back trail of posts, you will find many views of this scene over the years. Here the new, emerging foliage of spring gives the trees and forest a delicate look. The sun penetrates deeper and brings out textures in the wood, and in the scene overall. The wide, 6×9 ratio of the image makes it a real vista shot. I like it as well as any shot from this spot I have ever taken!

And now I have to tell you it was taken with my phone. I have new Samsung Galaxy S4, my first Galaxy and my first Samsung, but not my first phone with a camera. I had, a few phones ago, the iPhone 4, which had an excellent camera. Its range was extended in all kinds of useful and interesting ways by clever software from the vast iPhone ecosystem. I was impressed. My first HDR photos were, in fact, taken with the iPhone and the HDR Photo app. Still, it was a phone camera, and not quite good enough to tempt me chose it in any situation over my Canon P&Ss.

I don’t know how much Apple managed to improve the camera in the later generations of iPhones, as I lost my enchantment with all things Apple when my iPhone 4 died a way too early death, and the good folks at the Apple store wanted to charge me $140 to replace it with a reconditioned unit. I went Android. The camera in my first Andriod phone was certainly no temptation, as a photographic tool.

However, I do, already, find myself putting out the Galaxy S4, with its high resolution sensor; fast, wide lens: and built in software for all kinds of special effects (including an excellent HDR) even when I am carrying my Canon SX50HS. Take this shot. The Samsung HDR software (which appears to work off a single exposure), did as well with the range of light as I could have done with a full fledged 3 exposure HDR from my Canon, and way better than the in-camera HDR on the SX50HS. With my standard tweaking in Lightroom, or even processed in Snapseed right on the phone, the results are very satisfying. And, embarrassed as I am to be seen by anyone actually using my phone to take a picture, I can not, and do not, argue with the results. My Galaxy S4 pictures get uploaded to my WideEyedInWonder albums right along side my Canon shots.

Embarrassed? Well, yes. I mean, it’s a phone. And it is a thing. I mean the “everyone with a smart phone is photographer” thing. A “teen-girls snapping everything and mostly each other and posting every shot to Facebook” thing. It is, maybe, a “generational” thing. I am too old, and much too experienced as photographer, to be taking pictures with my smartphone. Aren’t I?

Apparently not.

So, it is Sunday, and somewhere in this story there has to be a spiritual truth, or at least segue to the spiritual. The spirit, of course, neither ages or gains experience. The spirit in us is always young. It is that inner child thing. The spirit in us is always looking for and fining new ways to experience and to share the wonder that is life…to express itself and to impress itself on the world of time and matter. The spirit in me is just simply delighted with the new toy/tool that that the wizards at Samsung have put in my hands. Any embarrassment is purely in the flesh (of matter and time), and, therefore irrelevant.

So, in obedience to the spirit, I will continue to joyfully enjoy taking pictures with my smartphone. I may have to vigorously suppress a twinge of embarrassment when the guy with the Canon D7000, a bag of lenses, and a tripod sets up beside me for an HDR session, but I can do that. It is only the flesh. And I will, of course, resist the temptation to turn and show him the pic I just took, processed, and posted to my social net on the brilliant high resolution screen of my smartphone. That would flesh too. Wouldn’t it? (It might be fun though…and my theory is that fun (good clean, non-malicious, fun) is always a segue to the spirit!)

🙂