Everything Went WHAT For a Minute?!

All right, all right, settle down, Doonesbury.

Slaggin' my beloved B&W!

Mike
(Thanks to Scott Kirkpatrick)

P.S. My iPhone now tells me how many minutes I used it the day before. Twenty-seven minutes yesterday, probably because I used the GPS to find my way from Geneva to Dundee....

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

SteveW: "No comment."

Comments

[Richard Parkin]

Wow! In 27 minutes that’s 2918 mph ... maybe I’ve misunderstood :-(

[Richard Tugwell]

You probably know that your iPHone also knows where you live. It does this by applying some common sense analysis to your location. ( As in, hey you were motionless at this GPS location between 22.00 and 07:00 most days)

[hugh crawford]

Sorta on topic, in settings > accessibility on the iPhone if you set it to classic invert colors and magnify on triple home button click it converts the iphone into a handy tool for looking at negatives without contact prints.

Well I just tried it to make sure and now it seems that that functionality has been added to the magnifier app itself. Still I remember when a standalone gadget to do that cost about 700 1980s dollars.

[Richard Man]

I live Steve W's "no comment". It's a neat trick to view all photos in B&W! Works great on iOS12 and iPhone 7+.

[Robin Pywell]

Geneva to Dundee is 1076 miles! :-)

[David Brown]

My iPad tells me my average screen time for the past week. I am usually appalled ...

[Eolake]

I love Doonesbury! I can only imagine how much I’d love it if I’d been a US babyboomer. I’ve read every strip, I believe.

[Brian Stewart]

It's a sad comment on the current-day, popular view of B&W, i.e. boring. I have the opposite view - I find a lot of colour photography boring, especially the tendency towards over-saturation. Not all, but a lot of it.

IMHO it's also an unintended comment on the skill required to produce a good B&W image from a colour starting point. A simple desaturation often is boring, a point which didn't really come out clearly enough in the "It Must Be In Colour / B&W" discussion.

[Nigel Marrington]

You drove from Geneva to Dundee and that picture of a pond is the he shot you're showing us?! Was it Luxembourg?

[Friends, I live in Upstate New York. Geneva and Dundee, doubtless named after cities in the Old World, are small towns in Upstate New York. Both local to me. I've learned my lesson! I'll try to write "Geneva, NY to Dundee, NY" next time! --Mike]

[Alexander Thorp]

> find my way from Geneva to Dundee

That must have been quite a walk!

[Speed]

Doonesbury also has featured comment(s).

“Why do you think they call it ‘Dopamine?’”

[Adam Lanigan]

This is an actual feature (though still in beta) in the latest version of Android as part of their "Digital Wellness" initiative. You can set your phone to go grayscale at a certain point in the day, which is interestingly effective after my first few days with it.

It's also a quick way to test out if any of the photos on your phone might work in B&W. :)

[Tim Bradshaw]

This is a thing people suggest in real life to reduce addiction: you can indeed make an iPhone/iPad do this, and I tried it for a bit. What I found is three things, two of which I knew already: things designed for colour often don't work in B/W at all; conversion is not trivial (and iOS does only the trivial part so everything looks grey); I don't like B/W which actually is, well, B/W.

The last thing is the thing I did not really know. I have always used fairly warm papers for B/W: I could live with cool papers I think (I need to try this), but it turns out that I really don't like very neutral-toned B/W, especially when mindlessly (literally) converted from a colour original. I've always found some (far from all) modern Ilford papers boring unless toned, and now I know it's more general.

(In fact I suspect that a lot of papers which aren't neutral are secretly 'colour' papers in the sense that the tone varies based on the brightness, do not only are they warm or cool but they aren't even strictly B/W at all. Pretty sure that's the case for, say, selenium toning, as well.)

[Ramón Acosta]

A couple months ago I started wearing a watch again. For the times when reaching for my phone wasn’t easy or not recommended (like in front of suspicious looking characters). And I found that know I reach for my phone a lot less, and the day my watch strap broke in the morning, I kept looking at my naked wrist every time I wanted to know, the time.