A flurry of email (and the joy of that noun is it could mean one or one thousand, I’ll leave you to guess but here’s a hint – start low) requested, nay demanded, to know what fiendish technology was responsible for a grainy facsimile of the Reichstag Dome.
It was none other than my latest dumbphone(tm). This one, from Nokia, appears to have been upholstered in cowhide, equipped with sufficient processing umph to operate a light switch and, boasts a camera with a plethora of creative modes. Of these, I tried just two; the first of which produced these rather average efforts.
The second, labelled a rather refreshingly simply “night mode” worked in exactly that manner. Ten pictures of a fetching neon lit city skyline all destroyed by some rather brutal post processing. The similarity between exposures was startling – think “black cat in a dark cellar, blinking” and you are getting pretty close to the compositional mood there.
I assumed that, in a market chasing niche, the R&D guys glued the camera, on deadline day, once all the proper functions of a working telephone had been been rigorously tested. An assumption that proved to be the equivalent of “Night Mode” in terms of its ability to stand the white heat of real world usage. Striving for an upside, the phone does offer the same level of consistent crapness trailblazed by the HTC PDA thingy in a package about half the size.
Probably not great as a sexual metaphor but certainly less intrusive in my trousers.