That being said, in a slight concession I'm going to switch gears beginning today. This is partly due to the fact that, at screen resolutions and even in print, the detail that comes from the phone is more than adequate. Also, I observed on this trip that the iPhone in fact does a much better job with certain types of pictures, particularly those that have high contrast with the sun out. And finally, on a recent trip to Seattle a nephew taught me how to extract the very best potential from the phone using RAW, which improved color fidelity and resolution tremendously. So here we are. Phone pictures are good enough - perhaps even better - in many situations, especially when I want to capture cultural and candid shots where silence and discretion are a priority.
Next I had to learn how to work with the iPhone pics. How is this animal different? For beginners the dpi straight out of the camera is 72 (instead of the 300 defaulted with the D850), normally ranging in size between 5 and 8 megapixels. In one street scene I upped the resolution to 300 dpi, and the size of that single JPEG ended up being a whopping 810 megabytes! Wow, so we keep them at 72, then up it to 300 only when a print is needed. Another adjustment to my workflow will include working with RAW files. Using what my nephew taught me in Seattle, the pics snapped with the phone are nothing less than astounding. I have Lightroom now and need the experience, so there's no excuse for not taking things up to the next level.
In post-capture after a trip or other photo session, I: 1) examine every photo taken and delete those that are not worth keeping in what I call the first cull - generally this ends up being about two-thirds of the lot; 2) carefully select those deemed blogworthy, frequently deleting more pics in what amounts to a second cull; 3) open each selected picture in Photoshop and touch up, saving the result as both a .psd and JPEG at lowest compression with the letter "a" appended to the file name; then finally 4) compress each touched-up picture down to about 1 megabyte with "comp" appended to the file name. This smaller file size allows for faster upload times when posting each day.
Last night, in going through Steps 1 and 2 above with only the pictures taken with the iPhone, I ended up with a selection of 104 pictures! Many surprised me at the look and technical quality when examined. But if I post each of these pictures we're looking at another couple of months of the Taiwan 2024 series, and at present there are two more trips to cover. Thus, I'll try to go through a second selection to narrow it down to 20-25 pics that might be of greater interest.
So here we go. The picture above was captured from a car stopped at a light. What makes it unique when we stop at lights all the time? That would be the fact that the motorcycle riders are our niece and her son, who we saw on our way to somewhere. Looks as though our niece has taken the opportunity to rest her eyes a bit before continuing their journey. There are two other similar postings that come to mind: this one and this one featuring my wife and sister-in-law from 2016, and this one from 2010 featuring my son and another sister-in-law.
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