Cats, dogs, and birbs (according to my phone)
,I’ve never really used iOS’s automatic thing-detection for photo categories before, but I was looking for a specific picture of a dog from my ~8 years worth of photos, so I gave it a shot.
The 231 photos my phone thinks are of cats include:
- A human eye
- A squirrel
- Three different dogs
- A highly stylized, deco-esque painting of a cat
- A cat-silhouette-shaped wooden door-topper
- The owl from Reigns: Her Majesty
- Amaterasu from Ōkami
- Plenty of actual cats
The 214 photos my phone thinks are of dogs include:
- Four different cats, and these make up ~7% of the results
- One of the dogs from Overland
- A grebe
- Myself
- Plenty of actual dogs
The 76 photos my phone thinks are of birds include:
- Moths
- A cat
- A terrible drawing of a goose that I made
- A terrible drawing of an owl that I made
- A terrible drawing of a pig that I made
- A terrible drawing of a t-rex that I made
- A terrible drawing of Krampus that I made
- A terrible drawing of… a fox, maybe? that I made
- A terrible drawing of a talking harp that I made
- A terrible drawing of that time that my friend’s beagle tried to chase a great blue heron and the heron noped out with like two flaps of its wings (that I made)
- A digital illustration of a pigeon singing “No Scrubs” that I made
- A statue of two hedgehogs that I obtained after its original owner retired
- Two different cats
- Some ice-covered trees (sans birds)
- A beer bottle with a sloth on it in front of a beer glass with Totoro on it
- Myself in a bird-print dress
- An Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp screenshot containing two lawn flamingoes
- A Pokémon Go screenshot containing two tiny Pidgeys
- A Neopet that is basically a penguin with stars upon thars
- A text message from my landlord saying ‘I’ll / l / B m’
- Postcard of an illustrated owl
- The goose from Untitled Goose Game
- Garfield loudly yawning
- The owl and the cassowary from Songbird Symphony
- Plenty of actual birds
Telephoto
,As is to be expected whenever Apple announces something new, a lot of shit is being flung around in the tech sphere over the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus. One particularly fun nugget is that the secondary camera lens on the 7 Plus’s dual-camera system is not, despite what Apple says, a telephoto lens. This is based on a few mixed-up notions from people who know just enough about photography to think they know a lot: namely that ‘telephoto’ is synonymous with ‘long’, and that 56mm (135 equivalence, when will this die) is ‘normal’ (and therefore not ‘long’ ‘telephoto’). 50mm was standardized on the 135 format because Oskar Barnack said so, essentially. Different versions of the story say that the 50 was based on a known cine lens design, or that glass to make the 50 was readily available, or that it was necessary to fill the new large image circle, but whatever the original motivating factor was – the original Leica I set a new standard with the 135 film format, and a new standard somewhat-longer-than-normal focal length with its Elmar 50/3.5. The idea behind normalcy is matching our eyesight. This, conveniently, tends to match up with the length of the diagonal of the imaging plane; √(24²+36²)≅43mm. 50 is already noticeably longer than this, and 56 even more so. There’s a reason 55-60mm lenses were popular as more portrait-capable ‘normals’.