Ollie returns to the Berkeley Marina Playground

Now that Daylight Savings Time has returned and we get that all-important extra hour of light at the end of the day, Oliver & I are finally heading back to our favorite playground at the Berkeley Marina. We spent time there almost every day last summer and we're looking forward to having lots more fun there in 2009!

On our first visit back to the playground this year we were lucky to run into a friend that Oliver met there last summer, Alicia, who is just a few months younger than Ollie, and her mom. A great start to playground season!

Here are some highlights of our playground adventure. As usual, you can click on any image to view the larger version in my galleries.

Oliver can barely contain his glee when he realizes where we are:

Ollie at the helm:

Oliver thinks it's a fine idea to dump a little sand on his new playmate's shoes:

Ollie basks in the golden glow of an early March evening.

Ollie has graduated to the "Big Boys" swings:

Who is this Berkeley Hippie kid?

Oliver inspects a random baby:

Spending time at the playground can be very exhausting work:

Communing with the Berkeley shoreline:

Oliver runs around with his friend Alicia and her mom:

Ollie demonstrates his jumping skills for Alicia:

Ollie makes his way up the dock so he can give his friend Alicia a nice hug:

A day at the park is incomplete without running through some puddles:

Ollie 'hangs-ten' with his new girlfriend:

Ma & Pa Kettle:

The rest of the photos from this batch can be viewed in my galleries starting on this page.

Oliver pays a visit to his friend Eric's shop.

Just another typical day in Ollie's World...

Ollie frolics with Christine:

Oliver plays peek-a-boo with a random passerby:

Eric shows Ollie anudder way of looking at things...

Oliver gets to sit in the boss's chair:

There's a few more beginning on this page in my galleries.

Would somebody please explain...

...why the auto white-balance functionality of my $299 iPhone's built-in camera works dramatically better under mixed artificial lighting than my $3000 Nikon D700 or my $5000 Nikon D3?

Seriously.

As you might expect of a $300 camera phone, there is no way to set the white balance - it relies on an automatic white-balance algorithm to set a white-balance that is appropriate for the lighting in the scene.

We all know that using the auto white-balance setting on our expensive DSLRs is a crapshoot at best - especially under mixed and artificial lighting. We virtually always end up with an image that is tinted and needs to be color-corrected in a photo-editing program. So we set our white-balance control to a preset that (hopefully) corresponds to the lighting in the room, or we take a reading of the lighting that we apply as a white-balance setting which usually gets us in the ballpark. Some degree of adjustment is still often necessary in post-processing.

Now, look at the photo below. It was shot with my new iPhone in a Berkeley restaurant that I frequent and where I've taken literally thousands of photographs with my pro DSLRs. The lighting in this restaurant is a nasty combination of tungsten and fluorescent lighting of various and sundry color temperatures.

 

While this image does have a very slight, almost imperceptible tendency toward yellow, it is way more dialed-in than anything my Nikons would come up with. The skin-tone is pretty much spot-on, which is always the goal when setting the white-balance for a photo with people in it. Why can't my Nikons do this? What does Apple know that Nikon/Canon/Pentax/Olympus, et al., doesn't?

Maybe at some point I'll post an A to B comparison of a Nikon and an iPhone photograph of the same subject taken under the same lighting to better demonstrate the stark difference between the two auto white-balance algorithms. For now, suffice it to say the difference is substantial.