Samsung S8. Out for a walk… Beautiful day. The mall is closed, though 
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I agree. These extreme zooms on these phones today do nothing for me. Even my pixel. I stop around 5x if that much at all.
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Zoom or telephoto needs good glass. If you don’t have the glass to provide the sensor with the detail in the first place, no amount of pseudo-AI jiggery-pokery will ever make a good picture of the resulting mess of pixels.
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What I think you mean is: Digital zoom will never compete with optical zoom.
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No, but they would probably make quite sufficient random noise generators 
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Thank you for this awesome pic!!
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This is Mr. Baxter the Bandit in the bow of my Bell Magic solo canoe as we embark in the early morning on our voyage in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northern Minnesota. My favorite place in whole wide world. Solo wilderness tripping is not for everyone. I love it. Mother Nature can really heal your soul when you are the human occupying a wilderness lake. No phones. No cars. No sounds except those made by nature. I’ve gone days without seeing or even hearing another person.
It was a treat to have this lake so calm as we got under way. Not often the case. The smell of pine was so thick you can almost see it. The Magic is a 16’ carbon-Kevlar canoe that weighs less than 30 pounds. A very seaworthy boat that paddles like a dream. Hauls me, Baxter, two packs, and Pelican box with camera and lenses all weighing together about 300 pounds.
As you can see Baxter was anxious to get the voyage under way. It takes weeks of prepping food and gear and studying topo maps to plan the trip. He knows when a trip is coming when the dehydrator cranks up and the gear totes come down from the shelves in the garage. He gets as excited for a trip as I do. His favorite part is portaging from one lake to another which means hauling the canoe and gear over those hills on very rugged trails. Some portages are short; 30 rods. Others close to a mile. He carries his own food! We take two trips to haul it over the portage so he gets plenty of time to sniff all the good stuff dogs sniff in the wild.
We usually travel between 8 - 12 miles per day. Find a campsite mid-afternoon. Set up camp. Make some dinner over the campfire. Enjoy the sunset and loon calls while sipping just a wee bit of Maker’s Mark. Conk out at dark. Get up at first light. Oatmeal and coffee for breakfast usually eaten while packing. Hit the water as soon as possible for more exploring.
This trip was back in 2009. Unfortunately, Mr. Baxter, now 91 in man-years, is too old to be humping the trails. We still get plenty of water time (when it’s not frozen) here at home in the backwaters of the Upper Mississippi River.
Hope you enjoyed the story. Good therapy to get my mind off other stuff for a spell.
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Good for Baxter! What pack does he use? And I’m impressed- a portage of a mile with 300 lbs. seems intense.
The canoe is hauling 300 pounds. I’m well half of that. I have to haul canoe (paddles, pfd), two packs, and pelican box on the portage. Hence two trips. Which makes a mile portage a 3 mile hike.
His pack is made by Mountainsmith. They make great stuff.
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I really like the second image, the first one, the colours are overblown and look “wrong”, the second is much more natural. Also so much more detail in the reflections on the coffee scoop. Nice.
Edit: have you blurred the worktop in the second one? Or is that a result of the colour adjustment?
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Hmmmm that smells good.
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Yuuuuup. The first is definitely saturated more. No blur used. Shot with the phone.
Definitely not a natural look, but I uploaded it to stock photography. Those selective adjustments are usually the ones that get selected for licencing and also gets more engagement on social media. I like both styles, but maybe, just maybe a touch more saturation on the flat one. 
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Letting my kids live their dream of being YouTubers while they can’t go anywhere.
It’s been fun, might even join in myself one day.
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Personally I would go for something in the middle. The flat one seems a little to dull to me, so neither of them seem true to life. Still a great shot though. It would never even occur to me to take a picture like that. I might have to make a project of doing something like that.
That’s very interesting about the licencing too.
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Yup. I side with you far as what I’d prefer. It’s one of those “lessons learned” when it comes to using stock photography as a little bit of passive income.
