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If you search for photo editors online, you will discover that there are dozens of them.  Including the word "free" does little to thin the list as many of these offer a trial period after which a payment is necessary.  Sometimes it is a single payment, but often it is expected that you will have to pay monthly. The three pixel editors I have included above are totally free, although two of them allow you to pay a subscription to unlock even more features and benefits.  Of the three, only GIMP is totally free, and has been available since 1996.  It has, of course, been updated, and is current as of 2024.  It works on PCs and Mac computers, but not on iOS or Android devices. Of the three, GIMP probably has the most Photoshop-like interface and has quite a learning curve to it.  Since it is open-source (anyone can add to the programming), it will undoubtedly evolve over time, as it has since it was first released. Pixlr is an online editor, which means that y...

I took two photos of the moving water, the left with Live Image turned off and the right with Live Image turned on.  Then I altered the right image in Edit mode. One of the problems I have with smartphone cameras is the inability to control aperture and sometimes even shutter speed and ISO.  Android allows you to have some degree of control over shutter speed and ISO in Pro mode, but the inability to alter the aperture has a very similar overall effect.  iPhones, on the other hand, give you almost no control over any of the exposure settings (exposure compensation excluded), but it does have a pretty neat feature that simulates a long exposure. Left:  the top and bottom of the iPhone camera screen. Right:  Part of the Edit screen from iPhone A feature that creates a Live exposure allows you to capture a short 1.5 second video of a scene.  I created a loop; you can see the video below. iPhone's edit mode allows you to take the live image and convert it int...

I used my iPhone to photograph the grasshopper (note:  he was missing one leg). I have done a lot of macro work over the years.  This includes work with macro lenses, bellows, reverse-mounted primes, extension tubes, macro filters, and even a number of microscopes (I once worked with a professor developing prints from his electron microscope - that was pretty cool).  I have been using my smartphones, both Android and iPhone, to explore how their macro feature compares to full-frame and APS-C crop sensor cameras.  This is what I found. Side view of the same grasshopper, 3x macro - this was the full image. If you are interested in getting a close-up of something just for a record, or perhaps to show a friend, a cell phone with a macro feature will manage.  How much of an enlargement you can get depends on the phone and OS.  For example, my Android has a macro mode, but it creates only a 5mp image and you have to use the 0.5x lens.  My iPhone 15 pro can d...

Left: artificial aperture set to minimum          Right:  at maximum Smartphone cameras are incredibly popular and take over 90% of the photos captured on this planet today.  They do have a few weaknesses that their larger brethren don't have, one being the ability to alter depth of field. To take a portrait on a DSLR or mirrorless camera with the background out of focus, I would pick a prime lens (85 mm) with a low minimum aperture (f/1.8).  With the background a good distance away I would have a nice shot of the subject and the background would be pleasantly blurred and exhibit a pleasing bokah. You can't do this on a smartphone, although the lenses are primes and the apertures are relatively low (f/1.78 in the above photo).  The problem is that the small digital sensors use very low focal length lenses to obtain decent fields of view.  In this case, the focal length was a paltry 6.76 mm.  There is so much depth of field at this f...

A few of the animals I have photographed using camouflage. If you want to survive in the wild, you have to be good at something, and more than one thing is better.  Sometimes it is in reproduction; many insects produce thousands of offspring with the hope that a few will survive to breed.  Others rely on speed that is used to elude predators or to catch prey.  Then there are those involved with chemical mechanisms that kill or harm would-be predators.  They often boast bright colours as a warning to others, "Eat me at your peril." And then there are those that are all but invisible.  Organisms that blend so well into their environment that they are almost impossible to see.  If it wasn't for their movement, you wouldn't notice them at all. Such was the case for all the creatures I photographed above.  The sole was photographed at the Maui Marine Center; I didn't even see it until it started to swim.  I found the crab while visiting Fiji.  Eve...

I have used both Android and iPhone cameras over the years and have discovered a few things.  I understand why compact point-and-shoot cameras have pretty much disappeared from the market, although there is still a place for cameras with long focal lengths such as Nikon's P1000.  Smartphone cameras have all the ease and most of the capability of their stand-alone brethren, and then they offer a whole lot more. Having said that, I have found that both platforms have limited abilities in the control offered.  Much of that has to do with the fact that they have a fixed aperture (often around f/2), which is great for low-light situations but problematic when a need to stop down is required.  While Android offers some capacity to pick ISO and shutter speed independently, that is usually not usually true of iPhone.  Even when the capacity is there, the experience could be better. I think that the cameras are built around people whose interest in photography is limited...

The spider I found is a western black widow spider, one of three species of black widow that occur in North America.  The fact that this one has another red patch on the back of its abdomen above the spinnerettes tells us that it is an immature individual. The one thing that people know about black widow spiders is that they are extremely poisonous.  Their venom is something like 15x more toxic than that of a rattlesnake.  The saving grace is that there is very little venom injected from a black widow bite than what a rattlesnake can deliver.   The good news is that black widow bites seldom lead to death.  You are more likely to suffer nausea, muscle pain, and swelling around the bite.  Symptoms usually last only 12 hours or so.  Death may be a result in people with compromised immune systems or in the very young or the elderly.   In 2018, it was reported that there were 1015 cases of people bitten by black widows.  Of those, there ...