Wall of TVs

I was in Currys in Mahon Point near Cork city a few weeks ago looking for ink for my printer and a World Cup match between Australia and Ghana was being shown on every television in the shop.  And there were a lot of televisions.  I’ve always been a bit fascinated by the wall of TVs you see in shops like this, and I remember thinking on more than one occasion when I was younger how cool it would be to have a wall like this at home.  You could watch something different on each one at the same time. Of course, back then watching every channel we had at home would have required a wall of…. just two TVs! Anyway, with my iPhone camera I snapped a photo of the TVs in Currys, thinking it might make for a good photo.  In reality, it didn’t.

The photo above is not the image my iPhone captured.  In fact, to call it a photo is a point some might argue with.  But it is derived from the image my iPhone captured.  I very rarely push images into Photoshop, and hardly ever start applying all the sorts of artistic filters and gradients that Photoshop has to offer, but yesterday evening, having been a little disappointed by the original iPhone image when I looked at it on the computer screen, I spent a few minutes tinkering with it and playing with some of those options I’ve never previously explored in Photoshop, and somehow, and I’m not sure how, the image above was the result.  I don’t love it, but I like it better to the original, as it masks some of the problems with the original, but still maintains a reasonably strong graphic appeal.

For the sake of comparison, here is the original shot:

In relation to the iPhone’s metering and exposure capabilities, I was surprised to see from the EXIF data recorded by the camera that this shot is captured at f/2.8, 1/17s, ISO 100.  The aperture is not the surprise here – a wider aperture makes sense as the shop was quite dark.  What surprised me was that the ISO is stuck at 100 while the shutter speed slows down to a pretty shaky 1/17s, especially when you consider how much of a steady grip it’s possible to get on the iPhone while capturing an image (i.e. not a lot).

I would have thought that the camera might creep up the ISO before slowing down the shutter speed, at least to something like ISO 400, which would have given me about 1/60s shutter speed, but I guess perhaps the sensor of the iPhone 3Gs gets very noisy at anything much over ISO 100.  I wonder how the iPhone 4 camera performs in that respect.