A Family Album

Much has changed during the past year, the Covid-19 year (this post was originally posted on April 2021). One of them was the decree that people cannot visit their personal hairdresser, the one person they trust to shape their image. The risk of exposure to Covid-19 is even higher for my mom, who is 97 years old.

I have managed to convince her I can be a goodenough barber for her, only after I told her my daughter, whom she dearly loves and have a beautiful long curvy hair, used to come to me to cut her hair when she was in her 20’s. I photographed my mom when we were done.

People often underestimate the smartphone cameras. Most have 12 megapixel (3,000 x 4,000 px), which isn’t bad at all, but their sensor is pretty small. This makes small pixels, and quite a bit of digital nose, as well was lower color and light contrast (because the range of light (full to none) arriving into the smaller “wells” is narrower). Therefore, these cameras are best at optimal light, and less so when the environment has low light and little contrast. Yet, there are some professional photographers who works solely with smartphone cameras!

I photographed this image with my HTC 10, that also take RAW images. For this image, however, I used its JPG version, which uses its full range of 3,000 x 4,000 px, unlike the RAW images that for some reason cut the image a bit short at the edges. The result was  that even under such indoor shady light conditions, the image came out pretty good! Of course, with a bit of work with Photoshop, but not more than anything I usually do with DSLR camera anyhow.

I have included the next two photographs just to show the potential. The first image is a cut from the leading image of this post, although a bit reduced.

The last image is a section of the full size image (1:1), meaning that each pixel on the screen truly represents a single pixel of in the original photograph. It shows best the photograph’s image quality.

Oh, and lastly – my mother, as well as my two sisters who scarily followed the process from afar, loved the final haircut!

This post was first posted in my Hebrew blog on January 4^th , 2021.