Matka

Bug!!

Found this bug in my drain while cleaning out my ollas so that they didn’t freeze in the ground during the winter. poor guy must’ve hidden in there during the rain and didn’t realize he’d get stuck 🥀He’s also clearly missing a whole freaking eye!! Nature is so harsh and beautiful <3 But once I got him in the pond he seemed to be wigglin’ happily :)

Staggis stealing my…. nothing

Dukkin

Muskrattin?

The fog

Every time we get a foggy day, I try my best to get out and take as many pics as possible. Fog is actually a really useful indicator of depth, which is perhaps the biggest limitation when it comes to phone cameras. (also the fog just looks dope, like hell yeah)

This area has a patch of sycamore trees that I’ve become a little obsessed with. It’s a beautiful tree with beautiful bark and I appreciate it for this sycamore forest for the splash of color they provide well after the leaves have fallen.

asphalt pit asphalt pit!!!

Dutch Angles

Another potent limitation of modern smartphone cameras is your sensor. Most (if not, all) phone manufacturers these days just save the money on developing a better sensor and just dump their money into A.I as if it’s a magic solution. I hate the look of A.I. upscaled images, I have some truly horrendus shit in my archive and I assesed correctly that I would rather do without the A.I upscaling altogether. All this to say thank you google for pushing me towards Open Camera, perhaps the best camera app I will ever use. The fact of the matter is that there is a limited amount of information that all camera sensors can capture. A.I. doesn’t help you zoom in, it just makes the fuzzy edges not look fuzzy, but all this does is demonstrate that a computer can’t always accurately guess where the edges are, and often accentuates or smears them.

But what does this have to do with dutch angles? Well, I’ve been trying to account for this limitation of zoom distance. It’s rarely useful to actually use the 8x zoom on my phone camera, the pictures are so blurry that it’s not really even worth keeping, most of the time. So I’ve instead pivoted to framing. Those corners are rarely used, and I understand the purpose of that, but it doesn’t change the fact that I only have so many pixels worth of space and I want to make the most of it. The wonky angle allows me to show off as much as possible. I’m still experimenting with the process, so I’m actually taking both angled and straight versions of the same frame to compare sometimes!

I think this is my best example so far:

Of course, the comparison is not perfect because I changed zoom, but there is no denying that any straightforward picture of this would just not produce the same results, I get the white of the clouds in the background, the yellow of the dried, dead goldenrod in the foreground, and I can make the haze covering the hills on the horizon much more impactful. There is context that a straightforward shot just couldn’t capture. At least with amy camera!

Food

y’all, I am unstoppable when it comes to cooking potatoes. Mastery feels so good.

Lewa ⚧️

Memes