Phone camera down

By Ed Piper

And so, the Grand Experiment ends.

Having a new smartphone--and being new to smartphones, in general--I decided in March to try to make my iPhone camera my secondary camera at sports events.

With the more-than-adequate eight megapixels, I began to use the camera for sideline and candid, non-action, shots.

I have an assortment of other cameras, besides my primary Nikon D5 body which I use for scintillating action shots of Viking sports.

But, I thought, the fact I would always have my iPhone with me, it would make sense to settle in with that device's digital camera as the "other" camera I could use to take the weight off my vulnerable back.

Well, lo and behold, four months later, I approached the point where, with 1,800 or so images on my phone, I was starting to get the periodic "Storage near full - check settings" message.

I sensed the iPhone's feature role as candid camera was nearing an end.

Finally, this week, I made the momentous move of deleting 1,700 of those images. What I discovered, which I didn't know before, was that my phone actually was weighed down by twice that number of images: 1,700 to 1,800 images on my "Camera Roll", and that many more in the albums I had created to group those photos.

Photos like those of La Jolla's softball team, which adopted my camera during part of a game last spring to take selfies and "Slo-mo" videos of themselves and teammates--that was raucous.

Others of LJHS football workouts, the L.A. Rams practice I attended last week in Orange County, and a whole host of other events, including my granddaughter's birthday party, a former Juvenile Court student I ran into at the fair with his baby, and many others.

For me, as a journalist and later also photo journalist who lives to record what has happened, the pain was always to get rid of information or pictures that could be used some day in a retrospective piece.

For an archivist, it is a cardinal sin to throw away what looks to others like accumulating junk. To a researcher, items from trips, reunions, and past Viking sports events make up an abundance of resources to remind, report, record, and inspire.

But, my wife and I having dropped the grandkids off at day care Tuesday morning, I parked my car in the shade--air conditioning running--and took the courageous plunge into deleting images one-by-one.

I had beloved photos of Spring Training in Arizona the first weekend in March, which I had taken on my first smartphone, a bulky Huawei Android monster that wasn't a convenient fit in my pocket. I'm lying: I deleted all those in having to reset the uncooperative phone the first week I had it, after it would send but not receive text messages.

As a fond reminder of my first Spring Training with a smartphone that could take photos, I emailed remaining photos from my trusty Canon point-and-shoot camera to myself. I placed those in an album on my iPhone, which succeeded the Huawei after four short weeks.

What I like about the iPhone camera is its resolution and convenience of always being on hand. What I don't like is the shape of the device, which doesn't ingratiate itself with this photographer with its non-contoured outer shape. Very hard to hold and fire shot-after-shot. You have to press a finger on the red circle to activate the shutter. This technological has-been, yours truly, is not graceful at doing that.

The point-and-shoot, though like other non-DSLR's does not have a fast shutter, is easy to grasp, takes marvelous if not high resolution zoom images (I took a photo of Aaron Rodgers from nosebleed seats at the NCAA basketball regionals at Staples Center last year--he was sitting near the sidelines quite a distance away), and is small and lightweight.