Took pictures of animals at Whittier Narrows
Now that I have a new phone, thanks to Dexcom CGMs and diabetes, I went to take pictures of animals with it.
I'd never been to Whittier Narrows Recreation Area before, and I wanted to check it out. It's so nice!!! It was full of people even in the late afternoon and evening, but it's a large enough park that finding some alone space is very easy. Tons of people were fishing. I saw a lot of people feeding the ducks.
When you go to a park to take pictures of animals you're pretty much going to find the same things all over LA: feral mallards, canada geese, coots, fox squirrels, and a bunch of little songbirds. We were not disappointed.
Here are the mallards and the coots:
We also saw common gallinules. I like how scary their feet and toes are. Coots, too, have crazy looking feet.
The geese were extremely habituated to the presence of people, to the point where they'd just lock onto you if they noticed you staring and try to intimidate you into giving them food:
Same went for the squirrels. They would notice you staring and come right up to you. This is probably not great, but it did allow me some of my only not-so-zoomed-in animal photos of the day.
There are a ton of great blue herons at the park as well. I had to zoom in pretty hardcore to get pictures of all of them. Here is a blurry heron with rim lighting:
I was jumping from an iPhone X to a 17. The overall look of the photos the 17 takes is pretty significantly different; there's obviously a lot of new processing taking place that I didn't have on my old phone. The zoomed-in photo modes are really urgently modifying the image to avoid certain kinds of noise and artifacting... but the smeary look it gives you instead is pretty dang odd. I am not sure that I like it.
I have no idea how this will look on your screen, but here's the smeariest duck I got:
This is clearly what most people seem to think looks good. Crucially, this stuff does look good, I think, on a phone-sized screen. On my monitor at home is where they start looking really strange. I don't think it's bad, really... It's just very odd to leap forward 8 years in mobile photography trends and so clearly see the changing preferences around this stuff. What "looks good" in a zoomed-in photo is a lot more subjective than you'd think.
Anyway, I highly recommend reading this article from Shel about digital photography, color noise, and mobile phone image processing. This stuff is very interesting!!
And if you live in LA and you've never been to Whittier Narrows, I recommend it! Next time I'll bike here!