Little Bryce Canyon (click to enlarge)

Last Saturday, Steve Fulling and I flew down to Richfield with my youngest son. The flight was all about breakfast and enjoying what turned out to be a beautiful summer morning. I was a little concerned that we'd run into smoke from the Milford Flat Fire (the largest wildfire in Utah recorded history), but it wasn't an issue. In fact I was disappointed that there weren't any cool firefighting planes at the Richfield airport.

I used the flight as an opportunity to see how well my iPhone would do with pictures. Here's some pictures I took from the air with the iPhone. Not stellar, but OK. The best thing about the iPhone camera in my opinion, is that iPhoto recognizes it as a camera and starts up and transfers any pictures to my computer whenever I sync. That's the behavior I want.

iPhoto's treatment of iPhone photos, on the other hand, is abysmal. The "enhance" button does a pretty good job on pictures from my Canon, but always makes the iPhone pictures look grainy and unnatural. Your best bet, I've found, is to take pictures with the iPhone with plenty of light.

I'm not sure what the horizontal lines are. (click to enlarge)

Can someone explain this picture to me? The picture is taken through the propeller. Most cameras ignore the prop or it turns out looking like a slight smudge in the picture. The iPhone created these horizontal lines. I'm sure there's some physics explanation of the interference pattern or something at work here, but I don't know what it is. Leave a comment if you've got an idea.