New "48 Megapixel" Smartphone

 

Stow Lake

I decided to get a new phone since my Moto G5 has been acting up the last few months, requiring me to restart it every now and then to get the camera  working. Its fussiness put me under the mistaken impression that it was quite a bit older than it actually is. I only just now checked my files to realize that the earliest images were from July 2018.

Anyway, I replaced the G5 with another $300 phone, the Moto G Stylus, which is advertised as having 48 megapixels, but which actually delivers a 12-megapixel image. In fact, the Stylus images are just a tad smaller than the G5 images (12 vs 12.2 megapixels). The Stylus does a slightly better job of processing those megapixels into an image, but it's not much to blog about. 

I took a picture with both cameras at Stow Lake, and pixel-peeping shows basically no difference in the image resolution.

Moto G5 Crop

Moto G Stylus Crop

If it isn't false advertising for Motorola to claim the Stylus has 48 megapixels, it probably ought to be. What the company actually delivers is 48 "quad pixels." 

I find this disappointing, but life goes on. It takes nice pictures for a $270 smartphone, and it also has a 2-megapixel "macro" lens, which is more like a wide angle lens that lets you get really close to your subject, which I do appreciate since the G5 was useless for close-ups.

Close-up with Moto G Stylus

The other thing the new smartphone has, as its name implies, is a stylus. I didn't really care about this feature, but I somehow got the false impression that the Stylus made 48-megapixel images! (I also don't understand why several reviews of the Stylus state, incorrectly, that it has a 16MP camera.)

Stylus Action

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Interspecies Envoy

 

I placed the full bird bath saucer on the ground to see what I might catch (and also because I was afraid raccoons would pull it down), but other than the neighborhood cat (who did not drink), the only visitors have been a couple of late-night raccoons. The camera trap has caught birds bathing in little plant-pot saucers in the past, but I have yet to catch a bird ever using the bird bath, which has been in our yard since 2002! It has sentimental value to my wife, however, so we've kept it around. And like I say, the raccoons seem to like it. Unfortunately I have to empty it periodically to clear out the mosquito larvae. 

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Night & Day

 

Looking East at Sunset Last Night

A Few Minutes Before Sunrise This Morning

The warm and humid atmosphere this morning reminded me of Hawaii. As I walked past Golden Gate Heights Park I heard a weird crinkling noise in the trees. I couldn't place it, but it kind of reminded me of fog-drip. There wasn't a lick of fog though. It was raindrops. The rain didn't amount to anything, but the novelty was a treat. When my wife felt the first couple of drops she thought a bird had pooped on her, so she was glad it was rain too.

The new Blogger layout is bugging me. None of the typefaces look right.

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Lifting Fog, Lifting Spirits

This morning was the first in what seemed like a long time that we weren't socked in by dismal fog spiced with chilly winds. My spirits lifted as soon as I walked out the door. In fact, I even went back upstairs to get my phone so I could take a picture. As I walked through the neighborhood it seemed like I hadn't felt the uplift of such a beautiful morning since spring, although that can't be right. 

Back on Aug. 3, I had decided to renew my "picture a day" exercise, but the view held nothing but a wall of fog the next day, and the next, and the next, and so on. Several mornings I couldn't even see the first row of houses at the bottom of the hill, so I gave up on the picture-a-day and even stopped bringing my phone. 

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Sunday Ramble

Sunday Morning Fog

Some days go so perfectly you feel in tune with the universe. Other days you figure it must be time for a tune-up.

I always get a tune-up when I visit Mt. Tam, even when some things go perfectly south, like yesterday when I locked my ebike to a tree and realized I didn’t have the key to unlock my battery so I could swap in the fresh one. With less than two bars left on the first battery, there was no way I was going to make it home. I’d probably go to zero on the hill out of Sausalito, or maybe in the cold, howling wind and fog part-way across the Golden Gate Bridge.

Luckily I had my phone, and once I was back in cellphone range I was able to call my wife to come get me. We still had some grocery shopping to do, so we met up at The Good Earth down in Tam Junction, which we’ve been curious to check out anyway, and where I was able to get some sprouted wheat bagels and tempeh, neither of which our local Andronico’s carries.

When I got home and downloaded the three trail cams’ memory cards, I knew perfection had been lost again when I saw that one of them had more than 4,000 images on it. This was from the third cam that I set up last week, and I figured I must have missed seeing some errant blade of grass that caused a lot of wind-triggers. I downloaded the images figuring it would still be worth it to weed out hundreds or thousands of “empty” frames in order to get the one classic bobcat shot.

But when I pulled the images into Lightroom I was struck by the fact that almost every frame looked the same, and that nothing in the images indicated what could have caused the false triggers. Also, every one of the 4,000-plus images was shot on the same day I set out the cam, and only covered a couple hours of that day before it shut down.

After mulling over this strange turn of events for some time, it finally dawned on me that I had set that camera to shoot a time lapse while we were camping at Sonora Pass recently.

This morning I drove back up to Mt. Tam, arriving just as the ranger opened the gate at 6:58 a.m., and the trail cam was indeed still set to shoot a frame every few seconds. Now I know, if you set time lapse on the trail cam, you have to unset it to make it stop. I swapped out the drained batteries, reformatted the memory card, set the correct shooting mode, and drove back home so I could get to the farmer’s market before the strawberries sold out.

By the way, I like the idea of using a trail cam to shoot a long time lapse. For one thing, it runs silently since there is no mirror-slap like there is on my Nikon D800E. The unfortunate thing is, the trail camera doesn’t compile all the images into a single time lapse video file like the Nikon does. I had to pull the thousands of images into Adobe Premiere Elements to create the time lapse, and despite following somewhat complicated directions I didn’t get the smooth-running playback that I’d hoped for. I was surprised a dedicated video program couldn’t make it easy to create a decent time lapse, especially since the Nikon does it in-camera.

Inquisitive Fox

Mom & Two Fawns Spot a Fox

Friday Fogbeams

Bolinas Ridge Trail

'41 Pontiac

Sausalito Pit Stop

Looking for Brocken Specter

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