Sleep. It’s become a mysterious and elusive thing. After a healthy, productive, busy day yesterday, I had a night of sleep that can only be described as awful. Sporadic. Discontinuous. Interrupted. Restless. So of course this morning I feel like a zombie. I suppose the answer is to have an unhealthy, unproductive, lazy day today in hope of getting some sleep tonight. What a pain in the ass.

I also assume that this is a side effect of age, not something disease-related. Though at the moment I’d pay for an eight hour case of something that would put me to sleep. I know, they make pills for that.

Here’s a little photography experiment. First, here’s the Fuji shot of the Biltmore library. The room was dark, so the Fuji compensated with an ISO of 10,000 and a shutter soeed of 1/100 second, yielding a very pleasing color and tone. The detail on the original RAW file is really good.

Now, for comparison, here’s a shot of the same room using the iPhone 14 Pro camera.

The iPhone chose to collect light at ISO 1000 for 1/30 of a second, and of course it did its famous internal JPEG processing. The iPhone lens is also much more wide angle than my prime Fuji 50mm lens, so you see more of the entire room. I cropped out the ceiling in the iPhone photo to give a more apples-to-apples comparison.

Both shots are decent, though the bright light from the windows is a problem in both. The iPhone’s rendition of the scene is a little more realistic – it captures the room’s darkness better than the Fuji’s light-gathering-crazed sensor. of course on manual settings I could have forced the Fuji into a more iPhone-like mode, with longer exposure and less ISO.

I have to admit, after looking at the two samples, I prefer the iPhone shot. That doesn’t bode well for my future with an expensive “pro” camera like the Fuji.

Here’s one other comparative set, outdoors at the rose garden. First, the Fuji.

Next, a similar shot with the iPhone.

The Fuji’s colors are quite a bit more vivid, but I can’t really say which is closer to reality. Maybe the iPhone, but I would probably pick the Fuji shot in a blind test. Though at a casual glance there’s absolutely nothing wrong with either. Once again the Fuji chose to take the shot at a higher ISO and faster shutter speed than the iPhone. I’ll have to think about why the color saturation is so much more pronounced on the Fuji.

But here’s the deal breaker for me. When I zoom in on each image, the near field focus on the iPhone is much, much better. That’s a big deal. I increasingly dislike the Fuji’s weak-ass autofocus, and this comparison just adds to the problem. Why use $2500 camera and lens to get an inferior shot to an iPhone?

Overall, the winner in this comparison is the iPhone. I’m going to keep doing these tests for a while, but right now it’s not looking good for the pro gear.