In the spirit of the fun Danny/Mindy rants they do on the Mindy project, here’s a little mini-rant from me on not changing settings on someone’s cameraphone.
While I was waiting to meet Ike Barinholtz, the crowd around him started to die down. I wanted to make sure someone was around to take my photo with him… I looked to the last group remaining (a group girls who’d just graduated high school), so we could have a plan of action of reciprocal picture taking.
Before I’d gone up to the girls, I set up my camera to automatically decide on flash or not, and to take HDR pics. My dad constantly has HDR set up on his phone. It’s a bit annoying because he gets two copies of every picture (and it’s a pain to deal with extra photos). Plus, you have to wait an extra second for the phone to do that. However, the one thing it has taught me is that the HDR pictures really do come out better probably 95% of the time.
Of course, most of the time if I’m just taking pictures of scenery or silly pictures of me and/or my friends, it doesn’t matter much. But, when I’m about to meet a cool famous person, or something where I want the picture to look a little nicer, I try to remember to set HDR. (It can’t fix my wide face or crazy hat hair, but it can still help colors look nicer and such.)
So, as soon as this girl took my camera, and I was standing with Ike, I saw/heard her say something like, “Let’s turn this off,” as she looked at my phone. Oh boy.
Sure enough, she had turned off HDR. And the photo didn’t come out great. Granted, I wasn’t dressed up and hadn’t done my hair or anything special. So, how great was it really going to look anyway? And, I know you can always photoshop things to look better if it’s really that important to you.
But, I guess all I’m saying is, people set their phones on things for a reason, y’all. Unless you’re Richie Moriarty doing something really cool and artistic where I know you’re gonna make my photo look as dope as possible, don’t change my camera settings!
Thanks very much. (This has been a public service announcement brought to you by vain people.)