We Were Trying To Find The Answers
November 12, 2019
Watching the sun set over Zürich Old Town….
We didn’t bring much camera equipment1 with us for this trip so we’ve been shooting with our phone a lot. Editing on the phone is enjoyable in its immediacy as well as embrace of “good enough is good enough” ethos, but remains unavoidably unrefined in many others - the need for multiple copies of lossy, camera-roll-polluting jpeg intermediaries as one round trips through various apps is one primary annoyance.
From left-to-right, top-to-bottom:
- Original shot from iPhone 14mm ultra-wide back camera
- Original base edits + colouration via Priime
- Correcting perspective skew + distortion via Skrwt
- Split toning, local adjustments + grain via LR Mobile
- (Not pictured) Crop to 1:1 aspect ratio via built in iOS editing tool
The final (uncropped) result:
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Our routing from Tokyo took us through Vienna, which meant a short but unavoidable intra-european segment on Austrian Airlines which has a fearsome reputation for strictly keeping to an 8kg weight limit for the single carry on. We’re quite experienced “one bag travelers” so the single carry-on wasn’t a challenge, but the weight limit was - a Sony A7rIV + 12-105 f/4 G weighs 1.3 kgs alone, which when you add in the weight of the bag (Belroy Transit Pack (1.1kg) and computer (12” Macbook 920 grams)2 doesn’t leave much extra room, especially if one wants to nip up to the mountains in the winter and needs some warmer clothes. Something had to give, hence the smaller camera. ↩
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Camera + Pack + Computer3: the urban equivalent of hiking’s “Big Three” (sleeping bag, tent, backpack) ↩
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We’re sad the 12” Macbook is no longer manufactured - it still has a place for ultra-light 1-bag travel where the (admittedly awesome) iPad Pro (even with iPad OS) still can’t quite cut it, but the full power of a larger macbook is not warranted. We’re going to hold on to ours until the day it dies. ↩
