Gadgetory

ladies and gentlemen boys and girls welcome to the first PocketNow challenge where we test real-world smartphone usage by pitting two PocketNow editors against each other we're starting this series off with a bang literally for the month of July we were feeling a bit patriotic at pocketnow.com so Adam Lane and I faced off in a photography challenge to see who could capture the best photo of celebratory fireworks now Adam is an accomplished photographer and he's been a primary resource in how we've been crafting our smartphone camera reviews he's also one of the most senior producers on the site writing for pocketnow.com since its inception for all of the content creation experience between the two of us the subtitle for this challenge might as well have been the best laid plans of mice and men my intention with this farce challenge was to travel all the way to the Brooklyn Bridge Park really early on the fourth of July get a good spot and set up my tripod and you know take some really epic photographs of the Macy's fourth of July fireworks over there in Manhattan found a pretty nice spot here that looked pretty good but then I moved south a bit more and found another spot here and that's where I decided to wait for four hours then with one hour to go before the show was about to start the rain came so Adams got a pretty crazy advantage in doing this out in New York we've got that New York City skyline that he can fall back on and you know I've taken some fireworks photos out here in Los Angeles before and they almost always come out looking kind of plain you know unless you're right on top of some iconic landmark it's just fireworks up in the sky and I want something a little bit more recognizable than that on something a little bit more identifiable and so to directa fie that situation we're actually driving down now we're gonna go hit the fireworks show at Dodger Stadium which is gonna be bonus points because it's gonna be my my little baby daughter's first baseball game so that's that's gonna be pretty cool too but we wanted something that that's iconic that's Americana that's definitely its quintessential Los Angeles so hopefully we can give Adam a good run for his money but exciting locale okay it's pouring here so what do we know about Adam we know that he's a Windows Phone fan so in a photography contest that means I'm probably gonna be facing off against a Lumia 1020 he might surprise me maybe throw in a 950 or a 930 or a 1520 but now this is photos so he's probably gonna go with the bigger image sensor the the mighty 1020 PureView camera system that 2/3 inch sensor so I've really been struggling as to what I'm going to bring to fight that I know fireworks are high contrast lighting situations would be like dark skies dark baseball stadium bright lights I want to try and capture so ultimately I mean I really I was really struggling with this I was looking at the LG g5 or the galaxy s7 but the galaxy s7 is low light capabilities image stabilization that's not really what I need I need better contrast in color so I altum Utley cited on the Huawei p9 and should it really be a really interesting fight because now we've got Android versus Windows Phone and we also have Zeiss versus Leica as the companies responsible for sort of influencing the cameras unto their various platforms however I also went to a fireworks show on July 3rd this one almost that Conseco damn a much more intimate setting my bicycle Darris supposed to avoid traffic and of course brought a couple Lumia 1020 s and tripod I set everything to manual manual focus is so 101 second charge beat rock Eng capture works so Dodger Stadium doesn't allow tripods I actually did read that before we drove ourselves down there I thought I was gonna be all clever and hide this in our diaper bag this is a gorilla pod which turned out to be absolutely useless as I didn't have really anything to attach it to we were just a little too far away from a railing for this to actually come in handy even though the p9 doesn't have optical image stabilization I was actually able to pull off a couple decent handheld shots where shutter speeds up to around a second and I don't have the steadiest hands but ultimately the lighting at Dodger Stadium proved to be too much they couldn't shut down all of the lights in the field was still pretty well lit so even shots up to a half second shudder proved to be too bright for me to recover information in the raw file long exposures were out of the question so instead of trying to fight movement holding as steady as possible why not embrace movement and here it is great photo needs to catch your attention and then bring your eyes into the details and hopefully generate an emotional response with this one the explosion at the top is it very crisp thin glowing lines that are almost straight it looks like a floating star at the bottom you can see details of the people watching this show we can see the texture and this girl's braided hair we can even tell what kind of phone she's using to photograph the show then there's this woman who isn't facing the fireworks is she taking a selfie does she take a picture of the audience we'll never know but it's interesting to wonder what she's doing the p9 is capable of stitching together some pretty decent panorama shots so about halfway through the fireworks display I just started scanning the whole stadium hoping to line up really well with a good burst of fireworks I really wanted to show off the location really tie into the field of the place that we were at and and really what's more Americana than baseball if I could have pulled off a selfie of me shoving out the pie in my face with the fireworks burst going off in the background I totally would have so even though I didn't intend to shooting wide helped deliver a sense of scale where I was at how many people were down on the field and how these fireworks were lighting up the night sky it maybe minimizes the actual fireworks bursts more than I'd wanted to but considering the limitations of the location I'm pretty happy with how this shot came out in terms of post-production I didn't do much at all this photo I did crop it a bit so that the main firework was more centered and I used some AC adjustment brushes to change the exposure of the really bright areas I also tweaked the white balance bit in the raw file to get the color where I wanted it to be and this moto did require some editing a post I had to mess around a lot with the exposure that trust a little couple tweaks to highlights and shadow detail but I did try to keep the cameras graininess so when I started the panorama shot it pulled its exposure information from one of the darkest sections of the shot so the ISO is just off the charts is the cameras cranking that as high as it can to try and expose for the scene not knowing that about halfway through the shot it's gonna be a perfectly well lit field I ultimately end up with a dirtier image but I kind of like a little texture in my shots it reminds me of old cheap film stock as far as an emotional reaction at least for me this image reminds me of love growing up in a small town where everyone would gather at the local park for a local fireworks display I remember seeing the faces of my friends only when the glow from the explosions shined the light on them there's much more intimate scene and concern how awful it was trying to see the massive Manhattan fireworks I liked the intimate display a lot better it was an amazing night the Dodgers won against the Orioles so there's that kudos but more importantly my wife and I we got to see our little baby daughter's eyes just go wide as we were sitting there in Dodger Stadium watching a pretty great fireworks display so there you have it folks you get to vote on a battle of opposites one of the more senior editors a PocketNow against one of the more junior producers we've got East Coast versus West Coast Windows Phone versus Android Zeiss vs. Leica and a very intimate portrayal of a fireworks display against something a bit wider bolder and a little more grand and while we both faced our own unique unforeseen challenges I think we both rose to the occasion and we're able to deliver some cool shots for you guys to check out who takes the win in our first PocketNow challenge you decide hit the more info icon so you can vote in the poll on this video we're gonna let this run for about a week and then we're gonna produce a wrap-up video detailing the results so that you guys know who you picked to be the winner of this first showdown and did you take any fireworks photos from your phone during fourth of July celebrations maybe you were out there celebrating Canada today hmm neighbors to the north would you like to see one of your photos featured in our winner announcement video later in the month send us an email at podcast at pocketnow.com tell us a little bit about how you took the shot what phone you were using where you were shooting these fireworks we know we've got some talented folks out in our audience and we'd love to show off your work too as always folks thanks to my for watching be sure to subscribe to this channel for future challenges we're gonna be detailing the next month challenge with our winner announcement video so you guys can be prepped for that definitely stay tuned we've got some fun stuff coming up for the PocketNow challenge for pocket now I'm Juan Carlos bag now you can catch me on Twitter and Instagram as some gadget guy and give Adam a follow as at Adams EE a Adams eya on Twitter I definitely check his work out - because he's a phenomenal photographer and you've been following me for content creation you should definitely be following him too so hit that thumbs up button for a little extra positive reinforcement and I will catch you all on the next video