Lori made chicken tikka masala for some dinner guests tonight so my job was to pick up the cilantro. I performed my duties well and the food was awesome! I love the supermarket near our house because they play thunder sounds before the automatic sprinklers wet down the veggies. I just get a kick out of it. This image was directly after the faux rain storm.
This photo actually demonstrates a very useful camera tip. All cameras have a minimal focus distance and they simply can't focus closer than this distance. (Do you have a computer full of fuzzy, washed out faces? You're probably shooting inside this range.) It's determined by many factors but unless the manufacturer builds in a macro option, that distance is typically about 16 inches. So how do you shoot things that are nearer to the camera than this? Zoom. The minimal distance is usually constant with a lens so you can zoom in and make it feel closer but still be able to focus sharply. The other advantage of zooming when using a flash is that the flash will meter better with a little distance to work with so you'll get better exposures and fewer of those washed-out faces.
With an optical zoom you won't see any degradation of the image. With a digital zoom, such as that found on my camera phone (the lens doesn't physically move) the "zoom" happens when the camera simply crops out the center of the image so it looks closer. This yields a smaller final image so you need to be okay with fewer pixels. In this case, even though the camera in the Cliq is 5 mp, this image is zoomed 4 times so the final image is only 640x480--or about 1/3 of a megapixel. It's basically the exact same thing as shooting it at full size and cropping out the center on your computer. I wouldn't ever use a digital zoom in a situation where I had a choice but with the nature of this project it was the perfect way to get a macro-type image.
The image name is an hommage to Nelson, the short-lived music phenomenon from the early 90's. Man, I loved that song.
See more of my work at www.jonwoodbury.com
