Kiss the Sky

Toys. We all seem to love toys don’t we?  

Of late the toys that have the most attraction for me are electronic.  Despite what you are thinking most of them don’t make whirring sounds.

The iPhone 6 came out a few weeks ago and I had to have one.  I went from store to store but they were all sold out.  Finally on a dreary Saturday morning early I stopped into a mall AT&T store and they had two.  Both were the huge ones, 128GB of memory.  Didn’t matter I bought a silver one.

Understand the reason why I had been wanting a new phone. Phones by themselves are utilitarian.  A flip phone is enough to converse and text with people.  No this unit is not for talking, that to me is irrelevant.  I desired the camera.  So much of my life has gone undocumented. Many of my creative urges have been thwarted. Why, because of the lack of a decent photographic instrument. 

My old phone was an iPhone 4s.  Over the years I started to use the camera.  As I did I realized I could be creative.  

As time passed I downloaded several photographic editing applications.  I got BeFunky.  Mostly I use this to insert text into photos.  I also picked up a copy of TimerCam Pro so that I could take shots on a 5, 10 or 30 second delay.  (Now Apple has added its own timer to the software).  I also grabbed PS Express and Wood Camera.  PS is clean, almost elegant editing software.  It allows you to adjust temperature and exposure and to crop shots easily.  Wood Camera does the same thing but it has some very interesting color filters.  Usually I do the basic editing work with PS and adjust the color scheme with Wood.

Over the past few nights I have been trying to take some night photography.  I did a Google search for night photo apps and came up with two, NightCap Pro and another.  The reviews showed that both had their fans.  I ended up going with NightCap.  Using my little Joby tripod I thought with this I might be able to get some decent shots. The documentation online for NightCap Pro is thin but I think I am starting to get the hang of the icons and what they control.

Both last night and the night before I was playing around outside using my phone camera trying to capture images of the moon.  Yeah the neighbors were getting a hoot out of me lying on the driveway surface pointing my little phone up toward the sky in the dark, dark evening. One guy with his dog stopped and starred.  He did not ask what I was doing, he just starred.  The above is what I captured. 

Time is short for me my friends at least comparatively so. For all of us from the class of 1974 these next ten or fifteen years are a time of summing up and putting the bows on the package of our lives. In the years I have left I want to capture a glimpse of something elusive and beautiful. Then I want to create something meaniful from it.  Me and my iPhone camera, it is my way of counting the railroad ties or flipping the hammer and affirming life.