Today on Travel Tuesdays we take a quick look at a phenomenon I’ve invented here in Santa Barbara with my new cellphone camera:  an iCurve.  Let me explain.

Chris and I have been here in Santa Barbara for 2.5 weeks, but I only just started taking scenic photos of town. It’s really a very pretty place, but I had some technical difficulties with my cell phone camera.

OK, well, to be honest I accidentally dropped it.  Then the case cracked, and … fast forward to now, when I have a new cell phone and cell phone camera.  It’s a different kind of phone from what I had before, and I have to learn how to take panoramas with the new camera, because it works differently than with the old one. Of course. Sigh.

It’s going to take some getting used to. Without even trying, though,  I got some impressive iCurves.  That’s what I’m calling the phenomenon I see in the panoramic photos I took yesterday of the  long wooden pier in Santa Barbara.

You see, in person, the pier stretches in a straight line from the beach out into the water. But with my new cell phone — which is an iPhone, for those interested in knowing —  the straight pier becomes an iCurve, i.e. a curved version of a straight line seen in a panoramic photo taken with an iPhone.

Maybe I should make that iCurve™. Although maybe someone already has — I mean,  it’s really a pronounced and not-necessarily-optimal effect that is happening automatically in my panoramas, something that didn’t happen as easily with my old phone.

For example, consider the following photo, which looks normal. You can see that the beach is straight across, and the pier is perpendicular to it:

Looking back from the pier toward the beach

But here’s a look taken in the other direction and taken using the panorama mode. The photo shows the other side of the pier, and  a different beach and the hills beyond the water:

An iCurve view from the pier at the beach and hills

And, of course, it shows the pier as curved, but it’s not a real curve — it’s an iCurve™.

Here’s another look at the same beach and hills, taken while standing in a different section of the pier:

iCurve pier and iCurve wire – note the two curves are different

I am intrigued in this one how the two different curves (the pier and the wire) are curved in different ways.

But  if I can figure out how to do an iCurve™ when I want to — and crucially not get one when I don’t want do — I’ll be on to something big…

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P.S. Thanks for everybody’s concern about how we’re doing since by now most of you have heard that there’s a big wild-fire near Santa Barbara.  Not to worry, though – it’s not actually in Santa Barbara where we are. It’s many, many miles from where we are in fact,  so we haven’t had any effects of it here in town, fortunately.

OK, perhaps there was a little bit of fine ash dusted on the car the other day. But … that could just as easily just be dust.  I mean, get the idea in your head of the possibility of there being fine ash dust in the air, and suddenly you start thinking that the fine layer of normal dust on our white car could be from white ash, right?

Anyway, the lack of blog posts this past week have had nothing to do with any problems created for us by the fire. I’m just having problems managing my time to get everything done.

Other than that, we’re doing fine.