Picture a Day: Sep 21

A few years ago we found out about the Ruth Bancroft Garden being lit up for the holidays, so we went, and it was pretty cool. I've forgotten about it in the years since; I'll have to see if they'll do the show again this year.

This isn't the best picture, but I still find it fascinating that smartphone cameras can take pictures like this, thanks to computational photography. I had my "real" camera on this trip, but was getting lots of motion blur since I was shooting handheld with a lens that wasn't that fast (I should've upped the ISO, but I'm not sure how great the image would've been anyway), so I switched to my phone. Even the Z Fold 2, which was known to have worse cameras than its non-folding counterparts gave me decent results to capture the memories of this visit.

I processed the image to sharpen a bit, de-noise, and slightly tweak the colors, but compared to the original, it's not hugely different. I could've done more, but wanted to preserve the feel of the original image. I'm down on computational photography sometimes because of the overprocessed looks for daytime shots, but in certain cases, computational photography has its benefits. I'm very curious when camera manufacturers are going to start incorporating more computational photography into their cameras to take advantage of it. Combined with better sensors and optics, it could be a powerful combination, as long as they keep it balanced.