Ahhh...it's finally spring in the city

Spring weather finally appears here to stay in the city. Flowers are sprouting up all over, and people have shed their winter clothes. Seems like everyone is out with a camera or cell phone taking pictures.

I have never been a big fan of cell phone cameras, but, since I recently upgraded my phone to a new Samsung Galaxy Note 4, reputed to have one of the best phone cameras, I thought I'd experiment with it to see what I could do.  Frankly, I wasn't blown away with the image quality for full res prints, but then what should I really expect from a sensor the size of a nail head crammed with megapixels. Nonetheless, I was determined to come up with some solution for achieving large prints that could undergo the scrutiny of close-up viewing. To that end, I began playing with some of the painterly techniques in Photoshop and finally have come up with something that I like. One of these test images is shown below. I will be doing some more experiments in the near future and post the results along with the method in a later blog post.

Meantime, here is the beginning of my celebration of spring.

Image taken with a Samsung Galaxy 4 Note camera and processed with painterly effect in Photoshop, and printed on Canson Infinity - Arches Aquarelle 310gsm  paper for a watercolor effect. 

This low angle view of the Flatiron Building and daffodils was taken with my trusty Fuji X-T1 and 18-135mm zoom set to 18mm. 

Of course, this is really how I know spring has arrived in the Big Apple -- a Mister Softee ice cream truck and the Empire State Building. Watercolor technique applied to an image taken with the Fuji X-T1. 

Shopping for flowers at the farmers market.