Weekly Photo Challenge: My neighborhood, My phone camera

It’s been awhile since I’ve had a new phone (think mid last decade), so never have I had a decent phone camera! That changed last weekend when I finally decided to buy a phone that was usable as, you know, a phone. Although I know I can use Siri’s voice commands to dial, I’m thrilled to be able to have a working keypad on my phone. Besides, I found Siri’s “I don’t know what you mean” comments to be so similar to a petulant teenager’s comments that I quickly tired if her. It was fun, though, finding out her (its?) responses to very unkind things said to her. Try it for a laugh!

One thing that I will not tire of quickly, though, is the camera on the iPhone 5. I’ve been clicking away all week. I thought my very first shot, snapped as we left the nearby phone store, was appropriate to this challenge. (I was NOT driving.) It isn’t the best shot, but it is my neighborhood!

I created this post on the phone too. That’s definitely something that I’d rather do on my laptop next time I’m writing this much text!

Next: Explore the many cool iPhone photography apps. Do you have a favorite? I’d love to hear your recommendations in the comments below.

Find out how others documented their neighborhoods in this week’s Weekly Photo Challenge.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Delicate

This week’s photo challenge is Delicate.  I love to photograph flowers because of their delicate appearance, even though many of them have rough edges and prickly bristles and thorns.  I’ve had just such a flower, a Schlumbergera brigesii, commonly known as a Christmas Cactus, for a few days now.  This week’s challenge gave me an opportunity to take some snaps of it.

I particularly like how the delicate flowers grow from a rough-looking stem.

Schlumbergera bridgesii

I like the idea of soft delicate things with harder looking backgrounds.   I tried to achieve that by layering some textures behind the image.  I thought that there was too much of a contrasting edge between the flower and the background, so I applied a watercolor brush filter to it, hoping to soften the entire image without losing the soft/hard contrasting textures.

Christmas Cactus

The result:   Meh.   Liked the concept, not the final product.  May need to give this one another go some other time.

Be sure to check out what others have posted for this week’s photo challenge.  Here are just a few; you’ll find more in the comments section on the Daily Post.

• Weekly Photo Challenge: Delicate (abdulmanafphotography.wordpress.com)
• Weekly Photo Challenge: Delicate (yobynos.wordpress.com)
• Weekly Photo Challenge: Delicate (joebeans2002.wordpress.com)
• Weekly Photo Challenge: Delicate (Light) (chrisbreebaart.wordpress.com)
• Weekly Photo Challenge – Delicate (staceycovell.com)
• Weekly Photo Challenge: Delicate (lifeof24hours.wordpress.com)
• Weekly Photo Challenge: Delicate (milnersblog.wordpress.com)
• Weekly Photo Challenge: Delicate (iamrcc716.wordpress.com)
• Weekly Photo Challenge: Delicate (ohmsweetohmdotme.wordpress.com)
• Life is Delicate (tracyconstantinewriter.wordpress.com)