FIRST PHOTOGRAPH
For anyone else my trip to Greenville, South Carolina to the nearest Apple Store to pick up my preordered iPhone 14 Pro would seem both an extravagant waste of money and an unneeded waste of time. But for me it wasn’t and for reasons no one will understand but me.
My iPhone 13 Pro, bought exactly a year ago works perfectly in every way and is still being paid for in installments. It’s camera works well and almost all the improvements on the new iPhone 14 Pro are improvements of the Lock Screen and emojis and satellite communication in an emergency when I am trekking in some distant canyon, all the features which excite most folks, that don’t interest me at all. Nothing really does except for the 48 MP main camera. And that is what this first photograph that I took with my new iPhone 14 Pro of a woman lolling on a chair in front of the Apple Store is supposed to illustrate. The subject in bad light didn’t interest me, it was how much I could crop the photo. It means that I can photograph someone who appears to be in the distance and crop to frame only her and then I can crop again to show only her face. And yet her features are still clear and fairly sharp. This was my whole purpose in buying this iPhone camera which I will use thousands of times this next year unless someone manages to lift it from me as almost happened in Paris.
The reason this ability to crop is so miraculous to me is because it seems impossible to do with a camera whose lenses and sensors are so tiny. All you have to do is to look around you at cameras that are able to take high resolution photographs that you can crop in this way. Professional photographers have them. They are bulky DSLRs which have large one inch across sensors which need a very large lens in order gather enough light to enable a clear photograph that can then be cropped. These cameras and lenses are large and obvious. Everyone knows when you are taking their photograph. They are so bulky that you need a large bag to carry them in. But the iPhone camera and lens fit in an iPhone less than a half inch thick that slips in my pocket.
The key to all of this is computational photography which needs a very powerful computer to make possible. When you click on the shutter the computer makes up to 3 trillion calculations instantly before the next click. The camera actually takes 10 photographs instantaneously at different settings and combines, pixel by pixel,the best features of all ten. The sensor is tiny and how it contains 48 million pixels, each of which is compared to 48 million pixels on ten other photographs is beyond my comprehension. How a film camera focuses light on film for a flicker of a second is at least understandable, sort of. But the processes of such a tiny camera and powerful computer are beyond comprehension. But this miracle is what is going to let me crop photographs such as this first one for the next year. My iPhone 13 Pro camera was beyond comprehension and this new camera is simply mind boggling.
So that is why, four days before my trip to Morocco, on the very first day of availability with no time to get the new iPhone by mail, I drove down to the Greenville Apple Store and traded in my perfectly good one year old iPhone 13 Pro along with $500 for a new iPhone 14 Pro which at $1.25 a day for the next next year seems very much worth it to me.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 