Category: photography

In the first post in this series [confusion.cc] I said:

I started using Lightroom mobile to take photos on my phone sometime in 2017 so that’s a logical place to stop… let’s see if I can get that far.

Well, I made it, here we go, 2017.

I started the year with the iPhone 6S but, as it’s an odd year I upgraded to the iPhone 8 Plus, the last of the iPhones sans notch. The camera was mostly similar to the iPhone 6S in terms of specs, enough that I didn’t notice that much difference. It did take better low light photos, less noise.

But I started the year with the 6S so lets go back to that. First photo is this beautiful shot taken on an unexpected trip to Antalya in Southern Turkey. On the way to Israel for a work trip in early January my flight was diverted to Antalya due to a snow storm in Istanbul. More info in this post [confusion.cc].

It was only one night, and by the next evening I was sitting on the rooftop lounge of my hotel in Tel Aviv, where I took this shot:

Fast forward 6 months and I took this next shot from a plane on another work trip, this time to Jakarata. This is one of the photos that I think is in my top 10 mobile photos ever. I used it as a background on my phone for a long time.

Up next is another photos from a plane, on yet another work trip, this time to Australia. But this time it’s our first photo taken on the iPhone 8 Plus:

Next up, jellyfish, at the S.E.A. Aquarium in Singapore:

My last two best of 2017 mobile photos were taken in Lightroom Mobile. I started taking photos in Lightroom in June of 2017, but not very many initially, it took a while before it started to replace the default camera app as my go to mobile photo tool. But by the end of the year I was taking them in Lightroom regularly if not most of the time. Today almost any photo I take is done in Lightroom, except for quick shots that I share and then delete over things like WhatsApp.

First up for Lightroom, this car, I think it was in Paragon mall’s underground parking:

And finally, almost at the end of the year, December 28th, this shot of the light show put on nightly by MBS:

So that’s it for 2017. 13 years worth of “best of” mobile photos. Will I stop now. Don’t think so. I’ve had fun looking back, now I will switch over to the photos taken in Lightroom but I think I will go on to 2018, and beyond. But once I catch up to now I’ll have to slow down, once a year post in January? We’ll see if I can stick to that.

On to 2016! I used the iPhone 6S the whole year so not much new to say about the camera. Looking back at my iPhone 6S photos on Flickr [flickr.com], There are a significant number of photos of sunsets, so why fight it? Let’s start by picking a few of the best sunsets, and let’s go in chronological order. Starting in March, this shot was taken in Phuket, Thailand at Mai Khao Beach:

Next up is this shot from August, taken in Batam, Indonesia. If you squint you can just see the Singapore skyline in the low haze in the center of the horizon:

Next up, this shot taken in Singapore. It’s not a nice as the others but I like the feeling for some reason with the street lights on and the pink fluffy clouds:

And lastly, from December, back in Phuket, Thailand again and at Mai Khao Beach again:

That’s enough sunsets, there are more on Flickr, not sure why I took so many in 2016. But while we are on the subject of Phuket, here is another shot that I like the feeling of:

Another shot from Phuket, is this crazy cool caterpillar:

I started taking the time to cleanup and post my mobile photos due to the extra time the COVID19 pandemic forced us all to take sitting around the house. In one way it’s depressing to look though all the photos that were taken while traveling when I’m stuck at home and at the same time it’s a bit of therapy for the same thing; living vicariously through reviewing the photos and remembering that trip, that place, that scene. I love to travel and while I can’t complain about being ‘stuck’ in Singapore, a safe, clean, easy place to live companies to so much of the world. Even in the midst of a horrible second wave of the Delta Variant, Singapore must be near the top of the list of places to ride out the pandemic. But Singapore is small, you can’t go more then 20 kilometers from my house without needing a passport, I can’t jump in a car or on a train and go out to the country… I have to go out of the country to do that and international travel is severely restricted if you don’t have a very good reason. C’est la vie. Enough of my first world problems for now.

Before we move on, one more travel photos, this time from Sara, Vietnam, is panorama of the rice paddies taken on a cloudy morning hike:

Lastly, staying ‘at home’ in Singapore, is a shot of on of the places I can go during the pandemic, at least when things are not so bad we are in lockdown. Here’s a shot of the super trees at Gardens by the Bay:

Next stop 2017…

Judging by my 2015 mobile photos on Flickr, taken with the iPhone 5S [flickr.com] or taken with the iPhone 6S [flickr.com], I must have been exhausted from the amount of good mobile phone photos I took in 2014 [confusion.cc]. I counted and there are about 50 photos in 2015 while there were over 70 in 2014. Not as big a difference as I thought but still…

Anyway, most of the year I continued to use the iPhone 5s and I took a couple of shots I would point to as “my best of 215”.

First up is this shot of a dandylion taken in Stockholm at a friends house. Lovely detail for macro shot on the iPhone.

Second, another macro shot of matcha power in a tea cup, waiting for the hot water. The color of the matcha is intense and set off well against the dark ceramic cup. The harsh light from my kitchen lights is a bit much.

At the other end of the spectrum is this telephoto shot of Millenia Tower near my office in Singapore. The monotony of the windows and the shadows are great. Too bad it’s not leveled correctly.

Per the norm, I changed handset to the iPhone 6S [wikipedia.org] when it came out. Skipping one generation. The 6S jumped the rear camera up from 8 megapixel to 12 megapixel. A sizable jump but, seeing as I didn’t get the 6S until late November, I didn’t take many photos with the 6S in 2015. One I will share is not because it’s that good of a photo but because it’s the return of the panorama!

You will remember, of course, that I started this journey into my best mobile photos in 2004. Back then I had a Sony Ericsson K700i. and it had a built in panorama program. You can see a panorama taken on the K700i in both the 2004 [confusion.cc] and 2005 [confusion.cc] entries in this series of posts. Apple introduced it’s panorama functionality originally with the iPhone 6. But I didn’t have an iPhone 6 so, I first got it with the 6S in 2015. I made full use of it in Harbin, China on my winter vacation. Here is the best example:

Please ignore the poor people on the right hand side, that a tragic story.

That’s really about it for 2015, but I want to jump back to the 5S and include this shot of some sticker graffiti in Tel Aviv:

In 2014 I used the iPhone 5S [wikipedia.org] all year, so nothing new or interesting to say on the hardware side.

In terms of photos; I took a lot of travel photos in 2014 with my mobile. I remember in 2011 I went to Turkey and I used my Canon G12 along side my DSLR. But when I went back in 2014, the iPhone was good enough. In fact I did quite a bit of travel photography in 2014 with the iPhone 5S. In addition to Istanbul [confusion.cc] which was a stopover on a work trip, I managed another side trip to Delhi and Agra [confusion.cc] while in India for work, and book ended the year with a trip to Japan and February: Matsumoto [confusion.cc] and Nagano [confusion.cc] and a trip to my grandparents house in Minnesota with a day-trip over to the Badlands [confusion.cc] in South Dakota . In all cases my Canon DSLR was my main camera but I used the iPhone for snapshots.

OK enough, let’s get to the photos, and lets cover travel first.

In chronological order, we start with Japan in February and this shot of Matsumoto castle in the snow. It was taken early in the morning, we were out before sunrise because it was our last day and it was the only day we got snow.

A few months after holidaying in Japan I went to Israel for work, and managed a stopover in Istanbul. I planned a 12 hour stopover on the way to Israel but got a free 24 hours on the way back too because I missed my connection due to bad weather. On this trip I use a couple of snap on lenses for the iPhone, a macro, fish-eye and zoom. Mostly I played with the fish-eye. The photos were cool but I never really used them again, too much hassle to carry and use. Here is one of the better shots with the fish eye though you can’t see the full fish eye effect in this one but you can see the distortion in the bottom.

And here’s a great shot of the inside of Hagia Sofia (not using the snap on lenses):

My next travel destination in 2014 was India. I took advantage of a two week work trip to go and mark Taj Mahal off the bucket list.

Last travel shot is from the Badlands of South Dakota, taken on a day trip, by car where we drove from my grandparents house in south western Minnesota most of the way across South Dakota to spend a few hours in the badlands before driving back:

On the same trip we stopped in Washington, DC for a few days, to spend some time with my mom and I snapped this photo of plants outside the Natural History Museum. I love the complexity of tihs plant, it’s amazing:

But I didn’t just travel, I also took a few shots around Singapore that I think deserve some love. This one of a staircase at Suntec looking up a the sky:

… and this photo of Tibetan prayer flags taken in Gaylang:

A lot of good photos with the iPhone 5S in 2014. The quality of the camera on the iPhone really showing. The best camera is the one you have with you, right? I think the iPhone 5S is where this really became more than ‘snap a memory for yourself’, you could actually take a good photo, that you would be proud to share.