#ScribesAndMakers 2025.05.21 /2 — Tell us one truth and two lies about your creative work

I told two lies about my photography, and here's the results, and the truth.

50% —I meticulously catalog and keyword my image captures.

This is false. I don't have the patience. When I do photo shoots, I download into a directory named with the date and the name of the photo shoot. If it's important, I will pick some favorites and process those into a WIP or a Final directory. That's about it.

50% — I rarely do any post-processing of images. The only way to become skilled is by capturing photos right in the first place.

Gah! This is absolutely false. Not only that, it's not professional, and moreover a recipe for missing the shot you really wanted. I take the National Geographic approach. I shoot the heck out of it, capturing hundreds and hundreds of pictures, then meticulously post process the few that I captured what I was trying to express.

83% — I use specialized and expensive camera for my creative work.

Most people thought this the lie. Nope. It's true.

I have a Canon R Mirrorless and a Canon 5D Mark III DSLR. Neither are "Professional," but a step down full-frame prosumer model. Add to this a 100-400 telephoto and an 85 portrait lens, plus a bunch of lesser but premium glass, and it's quite a specialized and expensive kit!

And. I rarely use it!

For the majority of my photography, I now use an iPhone Pro Max. Yes. Expensive. Not as good resolution-wise or auto-focus-wise, but for my purposes it captures shots I can't get with the Canon, especially low light and high contrast situations where in-camera processing works real miracles. HDR on tap. Yes, I shoot RAW. (Do it. It's worth it.) Night portraits capture the stars and the subject, hand-held! The flapping STARS!

I have a thing for stereoscopic wigglegrams. There is a built-in feature called Live Photos (Harry Potter photos). A sub-feature is Bounce. If I take a shot while moving the camera parallel to the ground a few centimeters, bounce creates a 3D illusion of depth. My Trees project uses this technique. I recently discovered the Long Exposure feature, which makes the water in coastal images misty while retaining the sharpness of the rocks and plants. Again, hand-held. No tripod required. Nice.

There are so many camera features and post-processing options on the iPhone, it's hard to find a reason to take out the heavy glass. Were I hired for a shoot, I'd would use the R and the iPhone.

But, wait, there's more!

I recently bought a Insta360 X5 that lets me take spherical 360º still photos. It has dual 210º fish eye lenses; the internal camera stitches to make 72 MP images that allow you to look in any and all directions after the fact.

No, there's no web player. AFAIK. You need their app to view that, but you can edit out slices, remove distortion, and create photo montages from the same capture. It is an action camera, meant for video capture, which I'm not into, but that's useful at times. I've done hyperlapses with it. There is something called Bullet Time (like the technique pioneered in The Matrix with dozens of cameras), but that's a future project. Early days for me. Took it on my recent vacation.Also expensive, though not as much as the Canon equipment. Definitely specialized.

The biggest annoyance is some editing features might be tied to paying for their cloud service, but I'm not sure, yet. So far, I've been able to export plenty of "flat" movies and photos. It may be where the web viewer is because it allows "sharing." Yep. Make money by selling something expensive and requiring a subscription. It's how our world works.

Two sample photos had further details in the #AltText.

[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]

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