Because I had the chance to do lots of photographing with real cameras during March and April, I kind of forgot about the camera on my phone. But when I Bluetoothed photos from my phone to my computer today, I realized there were enough for a post. Heck yeah!

For those of you who are new to our blog: I post pictures taken with my cellphone every month (or two), and every now and then Patrick posts a few of his own cellphone pics (taken with a much fancier cellphone). Click here to see previous cellphone pic posts (opens in a new window). No claim is being made here that these cellphone pics are of high quality, nor is any attempt made to tone down their junky weirdness. Nor are we implying, as Patrick mentioned in a previous post, that we would ever take your wedding pictures with our cellphone cameras. Unless you wanted us to, of course.

So, back to March and April: I can hardly wait to show you more photos taken with real cameras, but what with one thing and another it’s taking a long time to get those done. The cellphone pics, on the other hand, take almost no time at all to import and process. I pick random presets from my Develop Presets folder in Lightroom and just slap ‘em on and that’s all there is to it. Makes me feel like being a photographer is easy, for a few minutes anyway.

TO SEE THIS MONTH’S EXCITING SELECTIONS PLEASE CLICK THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE PHOTO BELOW.

It’s that time again…time for a review of the previous month via low-res photos from my cellphone. You can see my January set if you click here. February was an intense month, though the photos don’t necessarily show this. It was a month of hard work, plus lots of internal growth and change, and I’m very glad it’s over. Just keep pondering the ineffable as you look at these photos, and you’ll get the gist of February.

And yes, that is chocolate-covered bacon in the photo above. They are not kidding.

CLICK RIGHT SIDE OF PHOTO BELOW TO SEE MORE!

Sometimes there’s a very special sort of magic that happens when things don’t turn out as expected. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to embrace this as a necessary part of life, rather than doing everything in my power to force things back on track. Sometimes, no amount of salt thrown over the shoulder or “get thee behind me, Satan/Murphy’s Law” will make things turn out the way you originally planned. The trick is to turn it to your advantage. The old saw is “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade!” BORING. Screw the lemons. I like oranges. Let’s make tiramisu soaked with Grand Marnier!

I mention this because the Red Bats had a bit of an unexpected adventure a few weeks ago. There was some business that needed to be taken care of up in Sacramento, which is about a 3 hour drive from lovely Santa Cruz. We had the day all planned – a bracing breakfast followed by a nice drive set to a soundtrack of bluegrass and This American Life podcasts. It went perfectly. Right up until the point where we encountered the Toll Booth. I put that in caps to indicate a certain ominousness. Foreboding, if you will. Imagine dark clouds gathering above the booth, lightning flickering over the craggy visage of the Mad Toll Collector inhabiting the booth like a troll, collecting fees from the endless line of goats passing over his bridge.

Needless to say, we didn’t have four bucks on us to pay the toll, so we pulled off the road and entered the lovely town of Martinez, hoping to find an ATM. We did not find one. We drove around a bit. We checked the GPS in my car. We drove around a bit more.

Finally, having captured no leprechauns, finding no ATMS, and having failed to stumble upon a Reverse PanHandler (he gives you money if you let him yell at you), we decided to call it a day and see what Martinez had to offer. Quite a lot, as it turns out! We wandered around town, found a train station, a marina, several interesting shops, and an excellent Thai restaurant with a waiter who thought we were in a band because we “look artistic”.

We passed the new camera phone back and forth throughout our journey, each of us taking 5 shots at a time. Here’s a bit of what we saw:

When we first began our wanderings in Martinez that day, Rebecca remarked that this town, though she couldn’t say why, felt like the sort of place a person might happen upon and decide to stay in for the rest of their lives. “It just has that vibe,” she said.

To our surprise, we found a monument of sorts to someone who’d done just that in a rather spectacular fashion. Built in 1900, the Forester was the last intact schooner on the west coast. It was 250 feet long, 32 feet wide, and weighed 680 tons. In the salty halcyon days of its youth, it set a world record for sailing from San Francisco to Australia in a mere 75 days. But in 1935, the owner of the Forester found Martinez, decided to spend the rest of his life there, and beached his ship on the mudflats. It sat there until 1975, when it burned to the waterline. Here it is, presented in Authentic Red Bat SepiaTone(TM):

Martinez seems to have it all – beautiful vistas, the calming chaos of the ocean and a feeling of welcome for souls like us. (There are also oil refineries, but we’re looking on the bright side, remember?)

Seriously! I think cell phone cameras are great. Anything that allows a person to take a photo at any time (regardless of quality) is another opportunity for someone to appreciate photography. There are professional photographers who shoot with only point-and-shoot cameras, so why not cell phone cameras?

At this point I would like to assure potential clients that we will NOT be taking their pictures with cell phones. We will in fact be keeping our big fancy cameras and awesome lenses. Appreciating cameras and photography of all types is simply what we do.

Anyway. I’m prattling on about cell phones because I just got a new one. The Motorola ZN5 is a nice little candybar-format phone (I hate flips) that just happens to have a 5 megapixel camera on the back, with optics by Carl Zeiss, software by Kodak, and a real xenon flash. Not too shabby, and definitely a point-and-shoot replacement for me.

In addition, the phone bit works better than my last phone (which did NOT have a fancy camera), and the music player sounds better than my iPod. Hooray for consolidation, and for 2 fewer things to lug around in my already overloaded pockets!

Here are some shots I took with it while on a walk this afternoon:

You’re totally jealous, I can tell.