Droid camera follies

(Photo by Linda Hughes. [Linda Hughes is my wife.])

Yesterday morning (Saturday, November 19, 2011), after dropping our van off at Auto Wash in Canandaigua for complete detailing, we took our dog to nearby Baker Park for a walk.
It was beautiful Fall weather, strident Fall sunshine, although slightly coldish and breezy; long-underwear with a down jacket. About 45 degrees.
As we rounded a bend during our first circuit on a footpath, we came face-on with the two giant weeping-willows pictured above.
The willows were yellow, leaves changed.
The sun was right on them.
“Well, I gotta photograph that with my Droid when we come around again,” I said to my wife. We do four circuits.

A Droid-X®.

I have a Motorola Droid-X SmartPhone through Verizon.
It will take pictures, and in fact does pretty well.
It shoots Jpegs at 300 pixels-per-inch, same as my Nikon digital camera, although the Nikon could do tighter resolution.
I don’t shoot extreme with my Nikon. What I do is quite good, and shooting 300 ppi Jpegs maximizes shots per memory-chip.
(I could shoot at a lower resolution, and get even more shots per memory-chip, but I don’t.)
My Droid is so good, the only advantage to my Nikon is -a) interchangeable lenses, and -b) exposure and/or shutter-speed control.
Neither of which I have on my Droid; it’s auto-exposure.
I’m using auto-exposure with my Nikon, but don’t have to.
Like in the snow, when auto-exposure can get fooled.
But what my Nikon turns out is good enough to correct with Photoshop®, if I have to.
Which usually isn’t much.
So I unholstered my Droid, and handed off the dog to my wife as we rounded the bend the second time.
I set up to shoot the willows, still all yellow in strident sunlight.
But my camera-app was doing an anomaly.
It would follow the image about a half-second, then freeze.
I tried it again from start, same freeze.
The video-cam app was doing the same thing.
I tried again, same result.
I gave up. A picture with my Droid was clearly impossible.
I suspected I was doing something wrong.
We shot the above picture with my wife’s cellphone camera; not my Droid, but not bad.
Farther along I sat at a picnic-table, and tried “camera-settings.”
Nothing that would make the image unfreeze.
The camera-app was still doing the same thing.
One-half second and then frozen.
We drove home with only the image in my wife’s cellphone camera, which also presents hairballs.
But only to me. I pushed what I thought was the camera-button, but got “please say a command.”
I don’t know my wife’s cellphone.
I dragged out my totally uninformative Droid manual, but it was no help at all.
So I texted my hairdresser friend, the guy who prompted me to purchase my Droid.
He has a Droid of his own, an early Verizon model.
“I went to take a picture.
I fire up the camera app.
I see about a half-second live, and then the image freezes.
No shutter-trip.
What’s happening?”
He responded a few hours later.
“Take the battery out and restart,” he said.
Aha! A total power-off reboot.
A SmartPhone is a mini-computer.
With a personal computer a power-off reboot is to pull the plug.
I’ve done it many times — total power-off to a computer.
Doing that makes a computer rebuild its operating-system.
I’ve already had to pull the battery once with my Droid.
It had hung for some reason.
So I pulled the battery out, reinserted, and my camera-app was working again.
Here at home. Too late for the willows.
So I fired off an e-mail to my hairdresser.
Texting with my Droid is near impossible.
It requires use of a virtual keyboard on the SmartPhone display.
The virtual keyboard is near impossible. Chipmunks would be challenged.
“Battery removed, then reinserted.
Camera unfroze, I guess. (We’ll see tomorrow.)
Which begs the question, ‘What do you do if the battery is soldered in?’
(I worry about that with this here laptop. A total reboot from shutoff requires shutoff. What if I can’t shut off? Apple has some software solution requiring extended hold-down of the power-switch.
What if that’s hung?
I’ve had to do that once, but what happens if that doesn’t work?
I know all too well software can be flaky.)
I bet an iPhone has something similar......
(I’d have done this text, but it’s way too many words for a virtual keyboard, or voice-recognition.)”
—My hairdresser’s next SmartPhone will be an iPhone 4S. The battery in an iPhone is soldered in. It can’t be pulled.

• “Canandaigua” (“cannan-DAY-gwuh”) is a small city nearby where we live in Western NY. The city is also within a rural town called “Canandaigua.” The name is Indian, and means “Chosen Spot.” It’s about 14 miles away. —We live in the small rural town of West Bloomfield, southeast of Rochester.
• Our current dog is “Scarlett;” a rescue Irish-Setter. She’s six, and is our sixth Irish-Setter, an extremely high-energy dog. (A “rescue Irish Setter” is an Irish Setter rescued from a bad home; e.g. abusive or a puppy-mill. By getting a rescue-dog, we avoid puppydom, but the dog is often messed up. —Scarlett isn't bad.)