Knowing is half the battle

Knowing that Google is going to animate your images is half the battle. I can take as I said a day or two back, a mundane record photo and turn it into something special. Normally I would not get too excited about a side-on photo of an elephant but an elephant that is obviously alive and moving? Now that's something special.

I know they're horribly slow to load but they are fun. Both of these come from a sequence of photos shot hand-held with absolutely no tripod nor any other support at all. They were both shot on a cloudy day at quite high ISO which means that technically they're not as good as I would have liked. Having said that, the uniqueness of the images in motion more than makes up for that.

Technical details? I can't remember what I used to take these photos and there's no exif information in a GIF to help out. I'm not so sure I like the way Google has enhanced the images. I know they were taken at about 3pm - 4pm but the sun doesn't set until about 9pm so they shouldn't have golden hour lighting. Having said that, it's not unpleasant.

I am going to have to say that I really like what Google is doing these days. If you ignore the lack of privacy aspects of some of the Google operations, what they're doing seems to be very good indeed. I particularly like the way I can link my Chrome browser on my Mac to my Nexus 4. I gather a Chromebook would be the next level in linkage. My only criticism of the Chromebook is that they're not made quite as well as my Mac. I've had my Mac for 5 years and upgraded the operating system once. It's still as good as it was when it was new. Had I had a Windows laptop, I'd have had to upgrade twice already.

I did look into Android tablets to display my photos. I was not very impressed by those I saw though. The Apple iPads are very nice indeed and would talk nicely to my Macbook. The Android tablets don't cooperate well with Mac though I'm sure they would with a Chromebook. PC's I'm not so sure about.

What you're buying into with Android or Apple is an ecosystem. All Apple products talk nicely to each other. All Android products talk nicely to each other. PCs have been notorious for not talking nicely to anything, preferring their own protocol instead of industry standard protocols.

I had an Android tablet. It was a Nook Color. That was pretty good in a dry room. South Carolina is a humid place and so unsurprisingly, it went bananas. It was OK most of the time in the house but anywhere there was humidity, it was appalling. I got it for about $90 and struggled, 6 months later to get $30 for it. In the end I was getting so desperate to offload it before it got any more out of date that it went for $30. It was a case of either letting it go for that or taking it up to the shooting range to use it as a target.

One of the things that seems utterly bonkers to me is how a small Android tablet can cost more than a larger Chromebook which has the advantage of having a physical keyboard. I never will figure the genius thinking behind that pricing strategy. I would always rather a keyboard.

Looking at tablets, my other gripe is that they have the wrong screen aspect. Photographs are either 4:3 or 3:2 ratio. The iPad is 4:3 which is perfect for most compact camera users. Most tablets are 16:10 ratio which is not close to a digital SLR, 3:2 or a compact's 4:3. For displaying photographs that means either zooming and hence cropping or wasting screen real-estate. Let's face it, tablet screens are quite small. They're certainly not as big as a 10x8 print.

I have a feeling that there's more development needed in the tablet market yet.