I love my iPhone. That said, like most cameraphones, it performs rather poorly in dim light. I already knew the 2.0mpx camera was only so-so, but didn’t care because the point of a cameraphone is that you’ve always got it with you; it’s not supposed to perform like a Nikon D90. If I want to shoot good photos, I’ll take my Canon. Besides, this thing is made of so much other awesome that I’d probably still have wanted one even if the camera was utter crap. I got it for Christmas, and unless I’m in the shower, it’s never been more than a couple of metres away from me since; even then just because it was charging. If it’s not charging, it’s probably within reach. At night, it’s right beside the bed, though set on vibrate. I (heart) my iPhone.

Probably a week and a half ago, I had taken a photo of P’s cat when he’d just awakened because…well, because he was there, and is actually pretty cute when he first wakes up and looks like he needs a good, strong cup of coffee. For the hell of it, and because I know P. adores that damned cat, and because I like sending mail on my phone, I sent it to him at work. Of course, he loved it, so the next day, I did it again; this time, taking a photo of the cat in his Battle Station (AKA a cat veranda “cage” thing that fits in the kitchen window). This time, I made the subject “The Daily Kitteh”. Not surprisingly, he loved the idea, so since then, I’ve taken a photo of the cat each day and sent The Daily Kitteh to him at work. There’s actually a legitimate psychological reason for my doing it, too. He’s stressed out every day at work, and I know that, so a photo of his beloved cat serves as a reminder that home is not stressful, and the workday doesn’t last forever. A little “recess” to temporarily distract him from the South Americans who never have their shit together, and the Jamaicans who want everything yesterday, please, and yet don’t even really know what they want, and the French Canadians who drive him batshit because they’re world-famous for being rude bastards (and I’ve met few who weren’t). They’re not all incompetent (he generally gets along well with his Greeks, and loves Irma and Sture, his Swedes, because they’re always prepared, efficient and polite), but enough of them are that he often runs up against a Customs wall that he can’t get over on schedule, and through no fault of his own, so yeah, stressful.

Unfortunately for the fixed-lens, no image stabilisation iPhone camera, it lives with me in a house that was apparently built by Morlocks. There are windows, but other than the picture window in what’s supposed to be the dining room, they’re nothing special, and the lighting itself in the house is a joke; mostly crappy single-bulb fixtures that won’t take more than a 60w incandescent (though I use CF bulbs). The wiring in here might well be older than I am, so I don’t push its limits. Also, my subject for The Daily Kitteh is…a cat. Sometimes, cats stay still, but even P. would get tired of “here is your cat, sleeping….again”, so I try to take a variety of photos. Some of the cat’s favourite spots in the house, though, are some of the most poorly lit. The iPhone does not perform well in poor light, and the cat isn’t exactly the most co-operative of models (he’s improving–at least he doesn’t run from the camera anymore), so I’d end up with fourteen shots of blurry, grey, vaguely cat-shaped blob, and one that I could actually send to P.. I was poking about the App Store yesterday, and happened to notice something called Night Camera, which looked interesting, and was only 99 cents.

At first, I thought, “How much use could it be if it’s priced at only 99 cents?” so I read the reviews. Some were very good, and others were shit like, “Terrible. Doesn’t work, don’t waste your money.” I rarely pay much attention to the reviews on either end of the spectrum because the “OMG, this app changed my life!!!” reviews may be written by the dev’s mother, for all I know, and the, “Crap. Doesn’t work at all” reviews are most often written by the technically challenged, who can’t figure out how to make it work, then blame the software for their own inadequacies. Night Camera cannot turn a 2.0 mpx cameraphone into a DSLR, and it can’t do anything about the fixed lens, and it can’t create a flash where none exists (though one negative reviewer actually said, “I expected it to make a flash”…Jesus wept), and it can’t even add image stabilisation. What it can and does do, though, is use the phone’s accelerometer (sp.? too lazy to look) to determine that the camera is still, and at that moment, open the shutter. When I read how it worked, I thought, “Ahhhh…okay. That might actually be useful,” so I bought it. I tested it with the cat on the “dim” side of the bedroom, away from the window (there’s a furnace vent there, so that’s where he often naps), and got decent results. Last night, I decided to give it a different task; one at which my Canon doesn’t even perform all that well. Photographing my (so-so lit) 55g mbuna tank at night. I turned off the TV and all of the lights except for that tank, and I must say, I was fairly impressed with the results. No, it’s not “cover of Aquarium Hobbyist magazine” quality, but neither is the tank, and for a cameraphone with automatic white balance and ISO in a dark room, it’s not too damned bad. I cleaned up a little of the noise on the wall and the stand in GIMP (not too much, though–I’m not that proficient with GIMP), scaled it down to 1024×768, and the result wasn’t bad at all. I’d call it 99 cents well-spent. 🙂

Would be nice if that floating silk plant wasn’t in there, and that I hadn’t had to place tall plants in the middle, but Leo and Dr. Teeth decided that yesterday was a good day for Fish Wars, so I had to break sight lines and give the Doc a place to hide near the surface, since Leo was being an arsehole, and I only just got Doc out of the fishpital after the last time Leo beat the shit out of him. That’s actually why it looks like there aren’t any fish in there…Leo had them all too scared to come out from the rocks. Mbuna stay pretty close to the rocks anyway–mbuna means “rock fish” in Swahili–but last night, they were all hiding. If he doesn’t smarten up and be nice, he’s going to Fish Jail even if he is one of my favourites. Anyway, it’s not like I have fancy show tanks, or that I can have nice live plants in this one because the little bastards dig them up (or just plain eat them), so it’s no big deal. The fish live there, I don’t, so my main goal is to give them a home in which they are comfortable and safe, and my secondary goal is easy maintenance, since I live in what is essentially a giant fishroom and there are but 24h in a day. If the end product happens to look “not terrible”, then great. 🙂