Apropos of nothing

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This is another iPhone photo taken during my spontaneous 60-mile, shoulder-trashing bike ride last Monday. The "developed" image shown here is actually somewhat more ambitious than it may look.

First, the sun blinded me when it peeked through the gaps between as each coupling passed, immediately alternating with deep shadow during the late afternoon. The finder was barely any help in framing. For that reason, shutter release timing was complete guesswork.

Second, the iPhone's digital shutter is pretty unresponsive compared with any mechanical shutter, and changes in the available light may slow it down in unpredictable ways. This "dynamism" further challenges the photographer trying to guess when to release the shutter.

Third, the scene was a worst-case example of extreme backlighting, which makes it very difficult for the low-end camera sensor to expose either the background or the foreground correctly.

I think the result is interesting. Making only two exposures, I lucked out and framed the train just as I'd hoped to. The classically bad lighting was treatable in Adobe Bridge, and it even gave me a bit of aesthetic lens flare radiating from upper left. The exposure and color adjustment tools in Bridge are very good for bossing pixels around; don't know why they don't use the same interface in Photoshop, but there's probably a reasonable explanation. Anyway, the exposure tools let the user get very selective about scene exposure, information recovery from blown-out highlights, and finding detail in deep shadows, even with an underwhelming cell phone camera. The Bridge detail tool helped a lot to define edges in the deep shadows. And the interface for the color adjustment tools made it possible to goose up color that was almost invisible in the raw exposure, in this case the greens and golds in the field beyond the carriage coupling and even some blue, reflected from the sky, in the rail heads.

The other interesting aspect, which was none of my doing, is the significant skewing of the railroad cars in the opposite direction of their movement. It's almost an animation-type motion-exaggeration effect like you might see in a cartoon. This effect is accounted for by digital shutter technology, which scans what the lens sees similar to how a photocopier captures the image of whatever is laying on the platen. A digital shutter can create other random interesting effects, too: if you snap someone who blinks shortly after the shutter is activated, for example, the result can be a portrait in which the subject has one eye opened and the other closed.