Smartphone SIG visit to St James Church, Finchampstead in August 2022

01/09/2022 Paul Hendley

One Saturday in early August, on yet another very bright, hot and dry day, six BCC smartphone SIG members met at St James Church (mixed.underline.stealthier). This location was selected by our intrepid SIG leader Jeff Lawrence. In addition to Jeff, John Bickerdike, Brian Poulton, David Pottinger, Ivan Dickason and I spent a very enjoyable late afternoon.

This is a surprisingly impressive churchyard where we found memorials reaching back to the mid 18^th century. There are some splendid yew trees and a surprising degree of elevation change giving us a very wide range of light and shadow and backdrops to choose from. For me, the wooden crosses which were still going strong after 100 years or more came as a big surprise.

We examined the output at our Zoom review session shortly afterwards; a general conclusions was that we had all been surprised by the wide range of subjects that we each chosen. These ranged from macro to wide landscapes. While most of the group were using various incarnations of the iPhone, Brian had his older Huawei phone and the results allowed us to draw a number of conclusions. The smartphones (irrespective of make or age) cope remarkably well with very high contrast harsh lighting conditions but results could be fine-tuned to emphasize subtlety.

Here is a selection of our images

David