Experimental Nighttime Photography with Nexus and Pixel
6This is a cool blog by one of Google’s software engineers (now on the Daydream VR team) https://research.googleblog.com/2017/04/experimental-nighttime-photography-with.html.
In it, the engineer describes how he took a beautiful nighttime shot after dragging lots of pro equipment up a hill, and then showed it to teammates in the group that does camera related work on phones. One of the people on the team challenged him to recreate the photo with his smartphone, and the guy goes into a fair amount of effort to see just how far he can push the smartphone’s camera in night and low-light situations.
Beautiful pictures, and some great ideas there.
- 2 comments, 9 replies
- Comment
Read that earlier, looked at pictures taken on my Nexus 5X, then proceeded to frown.
@PlacidPenguin I feel the same way about my Pixel.
@moondrake
I feel the same way about your Pixel.
@moondrake I’ll take your Pixel if you don’t want it!
@Mehsturbator Lol. Still owe like $750 on it so I don’t think so. If I hadn’t spent so much on it I’d just use it for games, which is about the only thing it does well. It takes good photos in the right conditions, but terrible ones sometimes for reasons I haven’t figured out. It sucks as a phone, which is my main gripe with it. But I have innumerable problems with it beyond its inability to reliably make or receive calls.
@moondrake
Does it suck as phone everywhere or just in your house?
My pixel takes great photos and seldom has call reliability issues.
@f00l Google lied when they said the phones would preferentially use wifi. Customers with poor cell reception at home must install Hangouts, keep it running in the background, turn on airplane mode, then enable wifi to be able to use their phones at home. Otherwise no texts or calls at home, and you are burning through your data sitting right in front of your modem. When you leave you have to remember to turn off airplane mode, then turn it back on and restart wifi or no calls or texts. I can’t evwn guess how many calls and texts I have missed because my phonecwasn’t in the proper configuration, and it’s compounded by tge fact that this phone randomly silences itself every few days. This bs is going to get someone killed, I can see myself in an emergency situation trying to dial 911 but having to jump through all these hoops first.
I’m not alone, there are over 15,000 posts on the “forcing wifi calling or making it default” thread in the Google Fi forum. This is where people are being told to use airplane mode to force the phone to do what Google says it will do automatically. It affects only those customers that have poor cell reception someplace they spend a lot of time (home or work) but it is a straight up case of fraud from Google.
@moondrake
Any lawyers interested? Not that the purchasers would profit much thereby …
@f00l Yeah, I’ve been thinking this is a class action suit waiting to happen. The purchasers would probably just get data overages refunded and a fix for the problem, but that’s all most of us want. BTW, I saw that it’s over 15,000 views on that thread, not posts. But there are a lot of angry posts on there.
That lighthouse one didn’t even look real. Kudos to him, that’s some really impressive stuff that I’ll never have the dedication to do. Even though I do have and get some good daylight shots with my Nexus 6P.