Wednesday, May 03, 2023

Batteries and Tulips

It has been pouring for days, so the car did a lot of sitting over the weekend. I drove it to run a little errand on Monday, but when I went back out for the next excursion, it wouldn't start.

We have a little power pack in the car: purchased 20 years ago along with a pump to fill up our bicycle tires. It still works and has come in handy a few times to help charge our devices during power failures. It also has been enough to boost the car battery on occasion, and it worked this time.

Once the car started, we took it on a little drive to, hopefully, charge up the battery.

It worked! But I still took the car in on Tuesday to have them check the battery.

The battery is fine; apparently, this was just an unusual occurrence. Odd things do happen in life from time to time. While a car standing in bitter cold for days can affect the battery, standing in rain in milder weather should not have had any repercussions. So, I guess it was just one of those things.

I go to this garage often enough that they didn't charge me the standard $50 to run the test. Actually, it is not so much of a garage as where I get my tires changed. They do tune-ups but not actual repair work.

When I got home, I decided to take a quick phone photo of some of our tulips just before they bloom.

Both are phone photos. I used the Lightroom app to take this first one. It allows me to take a RAW photo, and I also found that it is a higher resolution image than the phone's native app.


Then I took a very similar photo using the portrait mode on the standard phone app. It's a similar composition and crop.


I draw no, or at least few, conclusions about the two apps. They both worked. The first, RAW, photo is higher resolution than the second, and despite is being RAW,  it was a slightly cleaner photo that probably required fewer adjustments. One expects to have to process RAW photos while the standard jpeg files should usually be just about finished straight from the camera. That wasn't the case this time, and I prefer the RAW photo even after also editing the jpeg image. 

Anyway, it was a quick experiment. That's all.

Meanwhile, the rain continues, and waters swell to close to their peak volume of a few weeks ago when I took those whitewater photos: like this one.


By the way, I just looked out the window, and the tulips still haven't opened, but they are darn close. I have seen pictures of tulip beds in Ottawa that are fully in bloom, for it is just about Tulip Festival time.

21 comments:

  1. Good to read that the car battery was OK even though finding it dead was confounding. We have 2 cars and my older 2007 Jeep is not used as often as the 2019 SUV, both are garaged here at the mill apts so at least out if the weather, which has been very wet here too. The older one is driven every couple of weeks and so far has been starting up OK.

    The tulips are as lovely not yet bloomed as they will be when you do a followup opening.

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  2. There is a slight difference between the two tulip photos but hardly perceptible. Both are beautiful. Phones can take great photos these days.

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  3. To the nonphotographer the images are so close as not to matter. I know the photographer has a much more granular technical eye. I prefer, if I have to choose, the one with some out of focus areas, more interesting.

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  4. Well done! I like experiments!
    Still raining...

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  5. They are both good, but I think I like the cellphone shot a little bit better. :-)

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  6. I think the RAW format picture is the better picture too. I have shot in RAW before but switched back to JPG format from the native app. Most of my photos never see the light of day and the select few that do are on Facebook and my blog, where I can load them up directly. I also rarely use anything beyond the editing tools in the default app on my phones. Only on rare occasions do I load it into Lightroom and do more advanced stuff on them.

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  7. These budding tulips are beautiful at this stage...but do invite you to come back and see what they have been so tightly holding inside.

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  8. I'm no expert, but I like the second one which has more color.

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  9. I shoot everything in raw. But I also photoshop most of my photos that I use. I must saw that my tulips have long ago dropped their petals.

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  10. I just had to replace the battery in my car. I had no problems but during a checkup it turned out there were 2 dead cells in it. So to be safe I got a new one.

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  11. I have to look very closely to even see minimal differences. I think the second photo has a bit more vivid colors. May be my imagination!

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  12. I think they're both wonderful!

    Have a good week and weekend. I'll be back next week!

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  13. Love that water picture!

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  14. It has rained for days here too, and finally cleared this evening.
    I like both photos. There are differences for sure, but the second is my favorite of the two.
    We need a battery for our tractor. Not a cheap buy these days!

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  15. It continues to rain here, every day. It's just too much.

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  16. The tulip beds you saw may be the ones I photographed today- if so, they are routinely the first to bloom at Dow's Lake.

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  17. Car problems are a pain in the but. I hope that they can assure you that the basic condition of the battery is OK.

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  18. On my A7RV Sony camera, the dynamic range is so good that I just use JPEG instead of RAW. In your example, the RAW does show the better colour profile and micro contrast.

    I did try a timelapse on Tulips during 2020. It was fun seeing tulips blossom and wither in 1 minute.

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  19. The water picture is mesmerizing!

    As far as the tulips, I like the second as well, owing to the extra color.

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  20. Tulips are both beautiful and sad to me….. sad because they tend to have their beauty for a day or two before they whither. But in the bloom they are wonderful.

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  21. The deer pretty much ruin my tulips.
    Coffee is on, and stay safe.

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