Greetings all!

Dropping in with absolutely NO TRAVEL NEWS. Nothing. Nada.

As you may recall from my last post, our plan was to head to the San Juan Islands last week. If we had I would have posted at least two or three times from the islands. But my brother and sister-in-law arrived on Friday the 23rd. On Saturday the 24th, they joined me on a short walk to the local library (about four blocks away). On the way back, Redmond’s lousy, tree-pushed sidewalks took my sister-in-law down. A hard fall when she hooked her foot on an errant sidewalk, left her battered and bruised with two broken kneecaps.

This put her in a local hospital until yesterday when they left for the long ride home. The bad side was no traveling for us but the good side was I got to see my brother for almost two weeks. And I got to cook just about every night. We were not able to get our money back from The Web Suites in Friday Harbor but my brother declared his against his travel insurance (see why you need it) and we were able to move ours to another time. We are thinking about going in early December so watch for pics then.

But enough about our woes. On to my new camera…or my new phone, I can’t tell which. My old iPhone 7 was on its last legs. The battery was lasting just enough time to go from 100% to less than 10% on my two hour walk. So when Apple announced the iPhone 12 I decided it was time to move on…up!

Watching the Apple announcement I was impressed with the fact that the new phone was 5G (can’t get it here in the house but was able to try it out in downtown Redmond—FAST!) and the form factor and look of the phone. But since I am a DSLR Nikon shooter, I wasn’t that jazzed about the camera. I figured it wasn’t a whole lot better than my iPhone 7. Then I started doing some looking and realizing that so much of the excellent photography I was seeing on Instagram was from phones. I started having online discussions with other photographers using only their phones to get amazing shots and I was convinced.

So during the event I was chatting with my buddy Mike in Florida as we both watched in our respective living rooms. When they showed the iPhone 12 I was thrilled and figured I would save $150 and get the 12 and not the 12 pro. But Mike convinced me that I should really think about spending the extra $$$ to get the pro because the cameras were so much better. Plus he said the since I am now skipping a bunch of generations of phones, the pro would last me longer.

So now I have had the phone for almost two weeks and I have to say I am impressed. It did take me a while to get used it not having a home button and to get everything to work together (watch, AirPods, etc.) but now things are flying smoothly and I am trying to learn the camera. Speaking of learning, Apple now has a program that gives purchasers of new products 30-40 minutes of education on those products. They send you an e-mail in advance and tell you that a week after you have the product you can set up an appointment to ask questions or focus on a specific area you want to learn. By the time I scheduled my online meeting, I had pretty much figured out the phone so I just asked them to show me all the features of the phone for pictures and video. Had an outstanding session with a guy named Derrick. Then I went out on a couple of walks the next few days and shot some different kinds of things.

Of course it helped that Washington is seeing tremendous fall foliage this year so I had lots of color to work with. And I haven’t shot anything indoors yet nor have I shot any video, so I promise to post that when I have it. But suffice it to say, I am darned impressed. Below are six shots I took with the new iPhone. And they have never been in Photoshop. The camera just knows what to do. If you click one of the photos you will get a scrollable slide show so you can really see the incredible quality. 

Somehow this paragraph was dropped when I originally posted this. I had a quote from Steve Jobs below. Just last week while searching YouTube for videos comparing the different versions of the new iPhone I came across the original video of Steve Jobs introducing the first iPhone. That’s where the quote below came from. I just wanted to say that Steve messed this one up when he said the iPhone was only an iPod, a phone and an internet mobile communicator. What it has also become is a damn good camera. In fact the cameras on phones has pretty much killed an entire segment of the camera world, the point-and-shoot. 

An iPod, a phone, an internet mobile communicator… these are NOT three separate devices! And we are calling it iPhone! Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone. And here it is. —Steve Jobs