It is a beautifully crisp and cold Christmas morning here in the mountains of eastern Pennsylvania. I want to wish all of my readers a blessed and glorious holiday, hopefully, graced by the love of family and friends. Here are a few Christmas presents for all of you delivered via YouTube.

I’ve always enjoyed the now controversial song Baby its Cold Outside. With its reputation tarnished by the “Me Too” movement, it remains (unless clumsily brought “up to date” by over-sensitive types) an extremely clever dialog between two people flirting in a way that was perfectly understandable as innocent for of us that grew up in the 50s and ’60s, but now vilified as inappropriate.

Written by Frank Loesser, for many years it was performed only at parties by the author, with Loesser’s wife Lynn Garland singing the female part. It was apparently quite a hit on the cocktail circuit.

Here’s a version with the classic Dean Martin vocal track remastered to feature Martina Mc Bride as the female part. No one does sleazy better than Dean.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwGrg8UPTY8

Here’s is another take, a more contemporary version, this time by Natalie Cole and James Taylor.

Finally a wonderful clip from the show “Sing Off” with a truly unique arrangement performed by Ben Folds, and a favorite of mine, Sara Bareilles:

In the years since this aired, the song has been recorded multiple times horribly butchered so that it can conform to modern sensibilities. I won’t post links to any of these versions, they’re just too painful.

Once again, I wish you and yours a wonderful holiday season.

Cell phone cameras have many uses. I use mine to take quick snaps of documents, serial number plates or VIN numbers on cars or power equipment, or to take a quick image of someone’s business card. I send “food porn” of my barbecue efforts to my fellow cooks and product shots to Craigslist. For legal reasons. I have documented auto accidents I have experienced. All of this is very useful in my life.

Notice however that among the things I use my camera phone for, actual creative photography is not among them. I far prefer having a “real camera” at hand for those sorts of images, and I generally do. However, there are those times, when a potential image appears before me, and I am “unarmed”. Under these circumstances, I am forced to make do with my smartphone camera. These images tend to build up in my phone’s image files, among the images of serial number badges, tractor parts, and documents I need to send along to others.

Roughly once a year I take the time to pull these pictures out of my phone on the vague hope that they will be editable into her useful image. So in terms of this year, This is what I got.

Cell phone cameras, in general, are lousy for true creative photography. There are a variety of reasons for this. #1 They tend to have a very wide-angle lens, which unless you understand how to shoot wide, tend to produce flat-looking boring images. I know now that several cameras offer multiple focal lengths which will be helpful for subject isolation and less distorted portraits, but mine does not.

 They also tend to shoot in a wide format aspect ratio which can also be challenging in terms of framing.

The lenses typically are not particularly high quality. The bigger technical problem tends to be the imagers, which are very small, with lots of tiny pixels that, because of their size tend to create a fairly low signal to noise ratio(bad).

Recently a number of more thoughtful cell phone manufacturers have decreased the megapixel count of their photo chips, which improves image quality at the expense of resolution. My Samsung Galaxy S8, which is hardly a new camera phone, has a 12-megapixel imager, down from the 16 megapixels of its predecessor. Still, it’s pretty noisy, particularly shot indoors. Because of this, the dynamic range is rather limited.

I’ve written other articles here, where I give examples of comparison images between my Sony Rx 100, which has a still small, but much larger than a cell phone imager. It also has a much better lens. Real cameras work better.

Now that she isn’t to say that cell phones can’t produce enjoyable images. They just need to be viewed small, on phones or tablets. I find that when I try to actually print a smartphone image, I’ve got to keep the print size way down for them to look like anything reasonable. Generally, I don’t even try to print them at all.

Now there are some things you can do, to try and improve your cell phone results. My Samsung has the ability to shoot raw files, which makes them more editable in software.

 I have my phone set up with separate screen icons, that take me either to the camera’s normal mode where I can shoot Jpegs or the so-called “pro mode” where the camera will shoot raw. This latter mode offers me additional exposure and focus adjustments I can access prior to acquiring the image. One frustration that I have is that the raw images on the phone, despite the fact that they are recorded as the proprietary Photoshop. dng raw file, do not display in Photoshop unless I download them to my computer. This can make rooting out an individual image somewhat troublesome.

Still, if I come upon a scene that seems congruent with the focal length and the aspect ratio of the device, I will attempt a capture. Most times I end up deleting the image, but once in a while, I will save them for future use on my computer hard drive. Oh, and make sure your lens is clean.

So what is my message from all of this? I guess what I want people to understand, is that despite all the hype from the manufacturers about the incredible performance of their phone’s cameras, in most cases, it will be markedly inferior to a modest, larger sensor photography device. People should not view their camera phones as replacements for real photo gear, but perhaps as adjuncts, relatively low quality but always at hand.

Though I do have some nice-looking food porn.