It's bloody cold!

Darned right I used a British cuss word to describe the weather. It went down to 12 Fahrenheit or -11 Centigrade. It's cold and I live in a house with nominal insulation so I don't waste money heating it other than to keep it above freezing. I was amazed my car started so easily in the cold mornings. It was slightly more sluggish than normal but it wasn't more than a second slower.

I tend to use a cell phone a lot more for my casual photography these days. I can see exactly why camera sales are declining at the speed of sound. Everybody can get quite an acceptible photo from a callphone so they don't really feel like forking out the money for a compact camera or a digital SLR. To be honest you can see their point.

This morning I got into my car in the cold and took this picture of my windscreen. The ice crystals look absolutely gorgeous. This, to me, is the beauty of a cellphone camera - it's for taking photos of things that would otherwise be totally unrecorded and unseen.

A moment or so after that I had de-iced the windscreen and began my journey to work. This is actually my last week heading to my current workplace. I expect to start in my new workplace next Monday. Who knows what photo opportunities lie there.

Although I dearly love taking photos with a "proper" camera, I take a whole load with my cellphone and while my "proper" camera may take photos of a more aesthetically better quality, my cellphone is always to hand for opportunity photos. Take this early morning photo of a bookstore that I took a few moments before I headed into work.

Certainly you can criticise the photo for having visible digital nose and for blowing out some of the highlights but back in the real world, it's a very acceptable picture taken from the car park. The cellphone camera does better in good light but then so do people.

This is a simple picture of a gorgeous sunset that I took on my way home one day. It's just so easy to take interesting photos with a cellphone. I suspect they're more interesting because the cellphone is that much more readily to hand. 

This is the same sunset. Now the one criticism I would make of cellphones is that as they don't have a zoom lens then it's not really possible to do anything other than to crop the image which is something that I really hate doing. This is why I balanced the image and as luck would have it, caught the car coming toward me in the same frame, balancing the image even better.

Earlier in the day, the sun was against me and the cellphone performed particularly well. I was in a queue of traffic waiting for a somewhat lengthy train to complete its passage across the level crossing in front of me.

Yes - you can make all the criticisms that the pedants like to make. The reality is it captured the moment. Sure, it would have been nice to leap out of the car and take photos from the roadway. The reality is that wasn't going to happen. Certainly not in freezing temperatures when I'm in a nice warm car.

Let's just say I love my cellphone camera for its immediacy while I love my SLR for its higher image quality. Both types of image have a home in my heart.