Your Camera Phone

Let's talk about camera phones. In the olden days, cameras were cameras. You would take photos that would be saved on your camera, and then you would use a cable or card reader to transfer the photos to your Computer. You saved all your photos on memory cards or your hard drive. When camera phones came along, they were used the same way. Photos were saved on your phone, and then transferred to your Computer. But phones soon allowed you to send your photo via email or MMS. You could share your photos from your phone without transferring them to your PC first. In the mean time, online databases like Facebook, various Google products, Flickr, Instagram and Dropbox, gave you on line storage where you could stash your photos. Now those technologies have merged, and you can automatically transfer your photos to an online storage space immediately while you are taking photos. These days I use Flickr to save my photos, and an app called Flickr Uploader on my phone to automatically upload all my photos as I take them.

I use my phone's camera to take these photos, which seems obvious, but hold that thought. My camera phone takes really nice photos, and has some features such as a real nice panorama mode.

One crazy thing about my Motorola Photon Q's camera is that it makes a really loud shutter sound. Taking a picture sounds like a bear breaking a horse's femur. And you can't turn the sound off! In a quite banquet or during some sort of silent observance, it is extremely irritating. I discovered this is because my camera is sold in South Korea,where there is a law that requires cameras to make a sound, I guess for privacy concerns. I discovered a workaround by downloading Silent Camera, which doesn't make a sound.

Notice that Silent Camera has some different controls compared to my native camera. It doesn't have panorama mode, but it does have a strange mode called "serial shot" which takes a shot every half second or so until you turn it off. This got me thinking about my camera, and whether the camera really is the camera. Stay tuned.