Video 14: Using a Smartphone

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So many of us are using camera phones and sometimes tablets to make some pretty terrific pictures.

I made this one.

I was sauteing some colorful peppers, and when I put the cover on, I saw what I thought would be a pretty beautiful image.

So of course, I quickly grabbed my phone.

And that's what this is about, isn't it-- the ability to quickly take a picture without a big deal using phone cameras to quickly make images when you see something interesting, or in this case, something very beautiful, in my opinion.

So did my son, by the way, who made a whole series of photographs of my amazing birthday party with my family at Per Se in New York.

The dishes were created by Chef Jarrod Huth.

And so these pictures are basically portraits of each course, all taken with his camera phone.

And by the way, I adjusted the color later on, before uploading all of these for this tutorial.

And here when we're permitted to take a look at the kitchen, we see a place very much like a laboratory, showing process and equipment and people doing their thing.

So camera phones do have an important place for a means of making very quick portraits of various places in the lab, of the work, of the equipment.

You can think about taking the picture and then cropping it, for example, as I did here.

But for the most part, the quality of the photograph is not what we're encouraging in this course.

If you remember, we did a comparison between two images of a Petri dish, one with my phone camera and one with a flatbed scanner at a higher resolution.

Well here, is another difference for example of the device that we've seen before with the phone camera and with my digital camera.

And you'll see that the information is just not there in the phone camera, because of the file size.

It's just too small.

But once again, I'm going to say there is definitely a place for these very quick and impulsive images, which you're seeing now for the use of web designs, for example.

I was having a really great time walking around this lab, making a few images which work better with a little bit of cropping, and in fact, were used for the lab's website.

So there is a place for this kind of photography.

But remember, the quality is just not there and is not good enough for a journal article and certainly not a cover.

It might well be someday.

The technology is constantly changing with each iteration of the phone.

So yes, it's a great idea to practice walking around your lab, creating these portraits.

And certainly, it's an interesting way of getting you to see.

But in the end, you've got to use your full frame digital camera with the best resolution.

Here's an example of where I had absolutely no time at all to make a picture for what I knew was going to be a grant submission.

So this is a pretty, pretty fast image that I made with my phone-- pretty awful, and part of some equipment that was necessary in the research.

Took the image, straightened it out, then cropped it like crazy, knowing that eventually the final image was not going to be up close.

It was a figure on the first page of a submission.

So I did crop it in.

It doesn't look brilliant right now.

But in the next image, I edited out certain pieces and created a laser light, which was all illustrative, of course, not for real.

And so this is what I finally did.

I inserted it in a figure that we used for a page in the summation.

This is the page that we finally wound up with, replacing this image.

The idea behind this is, showing the two next to each other, I hope you agree that the image that I quickly made on the right is more appealing.

And it is taking up real estate on the page.

So why not make it into a summary graphic as opposed to putting every single thing you could think of in a graphic and make it unreadable.

This is a way of using very, very fast-made images in a submission.

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