When My XPERIA Camera Surprises Me

Recently, my interest in photography got stronger than ever.

Taken at my school's cafeteria. This picture, taken by my cellphone, turned out a lot better than I had anticipated. The only grudge is the loss of details of the two white stones.

To satisfy the beast within me, I will be taking three steps to get myself closer to the journey to taking stills.

Step one: album. I will be selecting favourite photos taken by myself, get them washed out, and compile them into an album. The album may even include metadata of the photos, such as camera setup.

Taken at MoDian, where I learn Chinese Calligraphy. Applied brightness/contrast tuning.

Step two: gear. However much I want a DSLR, my wallet doesn't allow it. So far, I have to settle with my good ol' Nikon Coolpix 3200 and my recently acquired Sony Ericsson Xperia X1.

Taken in front of my school's cafeteria in the evening.

Step three: blog. The reason I'm writing this today. A separate label "Owl's Eyes" will be created, containing picture posts.

And I did. I've even edited my digital watermark.

This picture was taken two months ago - note the different watermark. It is one of the photos produced by my cellphone that I like.

It's been months since I got my SE X1. Before I got it, I was kinda worried about the camera's performance. And I was right - X1's camera produces images of rather mediocre image quality. So I quickly learnt not to expect too much from it.

This photo demonstrates the weak dynamic range of X1's camera - the sky is totally blown out.

Not to say it is entirely useless, though. Having a phone with a camera naturally means you have your camera anywhere, which proved useful when a guy called Joe came across some busybodies some time ago.

Photo taken by Joe.

There are also times when X1's camera surprised me with rather satisfying images.

Low light, low ISO, fixed aperture, all led me to worry about the long shutter speed. Turned out the long shutter is a blessing in disguise for this shot after all.

Step 3 - done. Two more steps to the journey of light-capturing.