Every summer, our club has a “Scavenger Hunt.” We are given a dozen or so subjects to photograph before September. This year, the summer was about two-thirds gone and I hadn’t shot anything usable. I had recently bought a Droid X smart phone, and had read some articles about smart phones being used for serious photography, so I thought I could get interested in the “hunt,” and, at the same time, learn about my phone’s capabilities by using it to shoot my images for the project. One of the prescribed subjects was “reflections.”

I placed two identical, small pots from the Acoma Native American pueblo in New Mexico on a mirror on my kitchen table, used a piece of white foam board for background, and a homemade (from a white garbage bag) diffuser to soften the ambient light, set the Droid to “portrait mode,” and fired away.

I cropped the image, and did a little exposure- and color-correction in Photoshop Elements, then processed using “Corel Painter Essentials 4.” The Corel plug-in applies painterly effects to photographic images -- in this case it softened everything and made the irregular vignette.

After all that, when I e-mailed my “scavenger hunt” images, I somehow forgot this one, so it never made the show. I did subsequently use it in our regular club competition, where it did well. So, all told, I moved along the learning curves for the phone and Painter Essentials, made an image I like that involves some creativity, and got a "10" in competition -- a worthwhile experience.

Camera: Motorola Droid X phone, handheld, set to “portrait mode.”
The following settings were all automatically chosen by the camera:
Aperture: f2.8
Shutter speed: 1/20 second
ISO: 110
Focal length: 5 mm.
Metering mode: center-weighted averaging.