Getting the Picture

Posted 3:30 AM by Gerald So

Next to the number of photos taken since the advent of digital cameras and smartphones, I've taken few. I haven't needed a smartphone enough to buy one, nor do I have the money for a good standalone camera. Much the way people used to shoot roll after roll of film hoping not to catch themselves blinking, until last week I hoped for the best with a PlayStation Eye webcam and my 4th gen Kindle Fire HD7.

Last week I read up on the best times of day to take photos and went out with my Kindle. Instead of using its 640-by-480-pixel VGA selfie camera, I made short movies with its 2-megapixel main camera. It yielded 1920-by-1080-pixel, 300-pixel-per-inch imagery and I didn't have to snap the shutter at just the right instant. I uploaded the movies to my computer, took screenshots with MPV, and cropped the screenshots with GIMP.

See my Mastodon profile and book review blog for the results.