8:33 AM After i started using cheap Motorola phones from Walmart i ditched my camera completely. I mean, why should i have my pocket stuffed with a camera (which is also a pretty good 16 MP cheap pocket camera) when i have enough camera on my phone?

Let me explain. I first had a camera when i was 7 years old and that that in 1967 Romania was very rare. It was a cheap, plastic made camera using wide film but it was a camera after i cried a whole day so my father bought it. It was 70 lei (or a day's wages, when one loaf of bread was 3).

I owe it to grandpa who was the photographer of that side of the town at weddings, funerals, etc. who enticed me into having one. I think i broke it after i made a few films. Then my father bought me a 35 mm one from Russia (Soviet Union).

My grandpa had a small lab in a closet and i started to process my own pictures when i was about 10 (when i also first rode a cheap motorcycle). At @12 i did a whole series on a kindergarten class and made some money which of course i spent on photo lab materials, like films and paper and chemicals.

I kept that suitcase enlarger i inherited from granpa and before 89 i was processing color in the kitchen.

In 2009 i invested in a SONY DSLR 3/4 size 10 MP sensor which many said was not comparable with Canon or Nikon etc. of the same price. That camera helped me get somehow out of my chronic depression as i was walking many miles in the wildlife refuges around here and taking pictures and posting on flickr and interacting with people there (hit the refresh button to get rid of the blocking screen on flickr).

That and installing and customizing Fedora over and over on an old PC, making it running like a new one, and then fb-uking and blogging, until its power supply broke and started using a laptop which i previously bought for travel only with wi-fi which fried my sensitive areas in my lap due to many hours a day usage.

My phone's camera has one feature that crosses into the pro area and that is exposure compensation.

You tap in one area of the screen and it gets you a tiny slider and you can adjust exposure until you make it look right (like evening when it's evening). The other "trick" i always use and it's also in my blood is i hold my breath the camera really still when i gently tap the shutter button, especially with long exposure times like in low light and that insures sharpness.

And of course holding the phone horizontally which maxes the pixels used from the sensor which is installed with the wide side matching the phone's wide side. Holding the phone vertically cuts the resolution to about 1/3 for horizontal scenes.

It takes some practice but it's doable by anyone.

So yeah should not get intrigued when you see pictures of this quality on my blog.