Camera tricks (android phone)

My phone camera produces unsatisfactory photos under certain lighting conditions - we get all sorts of lighting at the Drawing Tuesday show&tell sessions, and sometimes the photos are rather poor.

I've not been able to - no, that's not right, let me rephrase it: I've not looked for how to change the camera settings - they're not under the phone settings, so where could they be? A bit of web searching reveals that these things are hidden in plain sight! To find them, via such instructions, you do have to know the terminology. And the basic moves - swipe left, open from the app. And what the icons are called.

(There is a theory that not knowing the terminology is what stops many people (usually those of a certain age) from using "smart" technology. A publication along the lines of "what does it look like - what's it called - what does it do" that covers various devices could be useful.)

I discovered that the menu for the camera appears when you open the camera from the cluttered screenful of icons for apps, ie not by drawing a V on screen or double tapping (which I didn't know was possible!) and then you swipe from the left.

On this list is Manual, which I'd simply disregarded, but now had to investigate. Oh! There's a brightness setting, a sort of wheel that you can touch to move to adjust the colour cast - cloudy, daylight, auto, fluorescent, or incandescent - and what a difference that makes!

In daylight, indoors (bright white matte and gloss paint) -

Cloudy conditions

Under sunny skies

Auto (with bonus focal point!)

Fluorescent lighting

Incandescent lighting

The  little round lamp is an LED light, shining on a white wall -

Set to cloudy

sunshine/daylight

auto

fluorescent

incandescent

Another possibility for getting a brighter photo is playing with the ISO setting. A higher setting indicates a faster "film", ie shorter shutter speed needed, so to get more light into the camera, use a smaller ISO number, maybe 200 or 100. If lighting is confusing, eg spotlights indoors, the camera doesn't know what to do.

All very interesting, but the proof will be in the pudding when, next time we meet round a table in a spotlit corner of a cafe, the Drawing Tuesday photos are taken.

Did you notice the "focal point" - the double circle? This appears when you touch the "camera" screen, and using it is a good idea in tricky lighting conditions. Sometimes the camera takes a little moment to adjust and focus, and premature clicking results in blurry photos. This is like the "hold the button halfway down before clicking all the way" on a proper camera - it's giving the machine time to do its very best.

Of course some editing can be done in camera or on computer, and often the "auto colour correct" function works fine ... but not always. I use googlephotos because they are automatically downloaded from the phone onto my laptop, and that program offers rotation, colour correction (tricky if the colour balance is bad to start with!), cropping... There's a keystroke for downloading, eg to Photoshop, where you can do more complicated things there, but laziness usually wins.  The laziest thing of all is to take a good photo in the first place!

Drawing Tuesday - St James Piccadilly

The church of St James Piccadilly offers not only the Grinling Gibbons carvings inside but a courtyard and a garden and all the bustle of a sunny, bright day downtown. I sat under a tree and waited for people wearing "good" colour combinations to walk by; sometimes one person brightly dressed, sometimes a group who happened to fit together -

Carol found the drop-in caravan, where anyone can go and be listened to -

Najlaa was in St James Gardens, nearby -

 Jo, in the garden, put the sculpted head centre stage -

 Judith found the church tower had a mind of its own when it came to perspective -

 Sue's tree gives a feeling of brightness outside and shadiness beneath -

Extracurricular activity - Judith had been drawing while out of town -

View from the porch of her B&B

Brief encounter

... with a "patchwork" "painting" by Ayan Farah (at Pippi Holdsworth Gallery). 

"Ayan Farah’s large paintings are stained, soaked and dipped with natural pigments sourced from across the world – plant dyes, clay, mud, terracotta, ash and India ink. You might imagine the works to be visceral and messily expressive from this description yet Farah’s patchworked pieces are tightly constructed and neatly stitched. " (via, writing about her Maps exhibition in 2016)

Images from the Maps exhibition:

"Made up of small square and rectangular fragments of antique cotton and jute (remnants of the artist’s previous paintings), these scraps are assembled and stretched into coherent surfaces – irregular grids in a variety of greys and creams, faintly suffused with delicate shades of yellow, orange, pink and blue.

"The works appear like fields as seen from the air – a patchwork spread of tiny abstract landscape paintings that confuse scale, place and perspective. Farah’s practice is informed not only by the history of landscape and colour field painting in a formal sense and by aspects of land art in a material one but by various traditions of weaving, quilting and embroidery. ... Farah’s fabric pieces are pressed flat or heavily creased; others have degraded through time and use, thinning until the woven threads are ready to tear. There is a literal stitching together of personal histories, techniques, materials and diverse frames of reference within the work, all underscored by the history, geography and politics of gender, ownership, labour and production."

Born to Somalian parents and raised in Sweden, Farah has lived in Hackney (London) since about 2000. The works are about a reclamation of materials (she uses mud and much more) and, given her peripatetic history, of place.

Out & about

For the record, a few things seen this week.

Monday: Why does washing the windows take all morning? Because so much has to be moved to get at them, and because you might as well replant the window boxes while you're at it....

Tuesday: Seung-taek Lee at White Cube, Masons Yard -

 A quick visit to Serpentine Gallery for a glimpse of what lies behind Christo's installation on the lake -

then a quick visit to the Royal College of Art degree show -

a machine for making dipped pots ... hmm ...

wildly chunky knitwear

 and an unsurprisingly interesting evening -

Enfield (a poltergeist and the first cash machine),
Bedford (airship sheds and a female messiah),
the Ratcliffe on Soar power station (and a jolly cafe),
and the tube without people 

Wednesday: Walking another section of the Capital Ring ... and coming across Britain's largest outdoor swimming pool, opened in 1906 -

The fountain is an aerator, helping to keep the water clean

 ... and a few other curiosities -

Though drastically cut back, this hedge remains

Striking combination of tiles in Balham

Thursday: PV for City Lit Advanced Textiles - now a two-year course - varied and interesting show at Espacio Gallery -

Yvonne Blackmore

Liz Parry

Shirley Hunter

Sarrah El-Bushra

Friday: Lunch with Vicky, followed by a shady ice cream in thepark in Muswell Hill -

Downtown, on Bond Street, shops had window displays tied in with the RA's 250th anniversary. After hours, jewellery is removed. This one embraced the idea that "art" need not be just painting, it can include other media; but using crochet cotton to stitch landscapes would be a case of "wrong kind of thread on the canvas" but those bright balls are visually better in a window than hanks of green and brown thread would be -

Excellent talk at RI on "Are we ready for the next pandemic" by a speaker who is helping with preparadness, eg by founding CEPI -

Saturday: Open Studios at East London Printmakers, lovely place, big and light and clean and tidy and lots of interesting things going on -

 Demonstration of collograph with chine colle by Amanda Taylor -

 Prints to buy and take home -

Quick visit to the Mile End Art Pavilion for the ESOP show -

Elizabeth Hilliard Selka

Lucy Marston