3 hours of coffee to 3 hour BlackBerry 9790 macro shoot

I had two people email-introduce me to Tony Reinhart last week, saying “You gotta meet this guy!” Well, thanks to Jacqui Murphy and Mark Walton, Tony and I ended up chatting at Coffee Culture for 3 hours this morning, PlayBooks blazing with pictures and videos we’ve created. We even got a bit of a makerly BlackBerry macro mod going on Tony’s 9900 and my 9790, since I brought along a few cheap plastic lenses recovered from disposable cameras + some scotch tape. Same deal as this time and that time.

Tony, a former Globe and Mail veteran journalist, is now a staff writer with Communitech. And, as I learned this morning, he’s a very skilled photographer, primarily shooting with BlackBerry smartphones. Now if you know him, please nudge him to post some of his most recent work to his blog.

All those inspiring photographs and all that coffee, had me crawling around in my yard back home after lunch, with my no-cost “macro” lens still taped to my 9790. The photos here are what came out of that shoot. Very very little post-processing done on these photos. 9970 device settings were: macro scene mode, no flash, auto-focus continuous, no digital zoom, no image stabilization, picture review off, image size 2592×1944, no GPS tagging. I’m not saying these are optimal settings, they’re just what I used today.

Garden rock picked up years ago when corn fields turned into Clair Hills.

Is that the Colorado Spruce?

I’m not typically a flower guy, but the gardens were really popping today.

Bleeding Hearts.

George’s Forget-Me-Nots.

Dandelion.

Ant hole.

Screwed.

Patio moss.

Globe Thistle, my fave.

Gotta enjoy the brief show before the finches mow this down for seeds.

Iris.

More iris.

Deborah Maple bark.

Snowball Bush flowering?

Abused root.

More patio moss.

Ants are surprisingly hard to photograph.

Taking long’ish distance shots with the extra lens still taped on led to some Impressionist interpretations. No post-pro here, just straight out of the camera. Going to do more of that this week. But not flowers.