[WikiEN-l] Free images?

[Anthony]

On 9/27/07, Monahon, Peter B. <Peter.Monahon at uspto.gov> wrote:
> PS - Off Topic - the smaller the image capture size, the greater the
> depth of field focus.  The beauty of the cell phone camera is that it's
> so small that everything is in focus near to far all the time - lens
> aperture settings are pretty much meaningless and inaccessible.  As they
> say, "take the picture now, you can always fix it in photoshop later!"
> Photoshop legit copies start ~$5US for older version on eBay and there
> are many free programs that offer tools to accomplish cropping,
> resizing, sharpening, blurring and other image tweaks functions.
>
Have you ever tried to apply an after-the-fact depth of field effect
using photoshop?  It's much easier to just set a bigger aperture
before you take the picture.  (*) And if your shutter speed is too
slow or your picture is too dark (or your ISO is too high and your
picture too noisy), there's not much photoshop can do to help you
there (get rid of the noise and that beautiful focus is gone).  Cell
phones cameras have advantages, they're cheap and small, but any
decent camera is going to give you the ability to use a small aperture
if you really want to.

I'm not even sure this is off-topic.  Teaching en.wikipedians that
cell phone cameras inherently take crappy pictures is right on topic.
If one person reading this is inspired to learn about the relationship
of aperture/shutter speed/ISO and takes better pictures for
en.wikipedia as a result, it was an enormous success.

(*) Try to produce [[Image:Jonquil flowers at f5.jpg]] from
[[Image:Jonquil flowers at f32.jpg]] using photoshop and let me know
how long it takes you.  I don't have photoshop, so I can't do it
myself.  I'm sure it can be done, but not in the split-second it takes
to roll a dial and set an f-stop (assuming you're in aperture-priority
mode).