Pay Phones/No Answer

Cell phones. I am thankful, indeed, for that huge invention. Before cell phones, the only way you could call someone was either from a business phone (local calls only and you’d better have a good reason) or the pay phone. When I was growing up, these germ laden contraptions were at almost every store, every gas station, and restaurant I can think of. I remember it would cost 25 cents to make a call (later 35 and then the big hike to 50 cents) and you would have to talk fast so you wouldn't get the monotone message telling you to insert more money.

I remember the day I was at Wal-Mart and desperately needed to reach my mom (this was actually in the early 90’s but, eh, close enough for this topic). I wasn't sure if she was at home or at work so I tried home first and the answering machine answered so the phone assumed I reached my call recipient and didn't give me back my money (if no one answered the phone, you could hang up and your money would clink into a change return slot). I had to frantically search for more money and exchange some pennies for “silver” so I could call the other number. Frustrating for sure!

This leads me into an assignment I had for my college digital media class this week in which we first had to take photographs of “urban landscape” and then edit them. We were then asked to publish our favorite edited image to our blog and give a detailed explanation of the edits. So, two stones being the killer of two birds (aw, poor birds) I picked this picture because it is one of my favorites and also reminds me of my childhood in the 80’s.

No Answer (Edited), a photo by Blue_Eyed_Geek on Flickr.

I titled this picture “No Answer” which is apropos for this broken, pay phone handset. I took this raster-based image with my 13 megapixel LG Optimus G Pro cell phone camera. The original image (viewable here) had a resolution of 4160 x 3120 pixels which is equal to the 13 megapixels of which my camera is capable. The image was edited through Pixlr Express. I optimized the image to a final size of 800 x 678 pixels through cropping and interpolation since I knew this would be viewed on a computer screen. I am an amateur photographer and am not really familiar with manually setting the exposure on my camera. Flixr shows the exposure of the original image as 0.005 sec which was the camera’s auto setting. When I edited the image, I was pretty happy with the amount of light in this image so I didn't mess with the contrast but I did increase the saturation level very minimally just to make things a little brighter since I shot on a cloudy day. I played with the sharpness a little but found that I liked the original image better because the sharpness tool took away the soft look I had and wanted. I liked the warm tones in the original so I didn't play with temperature changes. I then went into the creative tools and applied the “Max” effect. I wanted a little pop of color in the black and white area so I used the history brush to show the blue on the handset. My final step was to apply a border overlay to balance out the frame on the little boxes created by the earlier effect. I’m really happy with the final image. So much so that I’m considering printing and framing to display in my house.