The 'best' picture I've ever taken
There’s an old saying that goes something like “The best camera is the one you have with you.” That’s a little silly — you’re obviously not taking a picture if you don’t have a camera — but it’s also not wrong. (And, yes, it's one I tend to use a bit.)
I’ve taken countless pictures with any number of kinds of cameras. Mirrorless cameras. Micro four-thirds. DSLRs. Phones, of course, thanks to my day job. So many phones. And I’ve been fortunately to be able to test some of these cameras in some of the greatest cities in the world.
I’m not a big subscriber in having a “best” picture. I’ve taken better before. I’ll probably take a better one in the future. That’s the way it works, and it’s the way it should be.
But my favorite picture? It didn’t come from a traditional camera. It wasn’t posed. I wasn’t even standing still.
The camera
I left the Pensacola New Journal in December 2009. A month later, I was at my first Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. A month after that, I was in Europe for the first time, at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. And I was lucky enough to do that for the next seven years or so.
The work cycle was pretty much the same every year. CES in early January. MWC in late February. And a smattering of events in New York or San Francisco or somewhere else in between.
One of those in-between events came in October 2014, when the Taiwanese company HTC brought everyone together in New York. It was probably my favorite phone manufacturer of the era, but this time they were doing something different.
It was the HTC RE Camera. (Pronounced ree.) HTC gave it to us a day or two before the actual announcement event and took us around (and above) the city to check it out. It was fun. It was different. It was pretty simple. It was the beginning of HTC branching out from phones into other areas.
The HTC RE Camera shot at 16 megapixels for still videos, and could do about an hour and a half of 1080p video. Not cutting-edge stuff, but it was the form factor that was a big deal. I always thought it looked like a periscope. The whole thing was meant to be gripped, unlike the GoPro, which already was ruling the action-cam space. Long handle with the battery, the lens where you’d expect it, and a conspicuous shutter button.
As was often the case, I shot the video hands-on for Android Central in a hotel window. (I remember doing the voiceover early in the morning, thus the tired sounding Phil.) It wasn’t a particularly difficult product to figure out — quite literally point and shoot. It wasn’t spectacular, but it was fun.
The location
Fast forward a couple months, to early March 2015 in Barcelona. (MWC started late that year.) In addition to all my usual gear, I had the HTC Re Camera in my pocket, which was exactly how it was meant to be used.
Barcelona is an incredible city that actually reminds me a bit of Pensacola. That’s mostly because we have some Spanish influences here, as well as being bordered by a major body of water. The Mediterranean isn’t the Gulf of Mexico, but salt air is salt air. Seafood is seafood. And while Pensacola Beach is better (far less European, though), beach is beach and boats are boats.
My kind of town.
A good number of the press events and meetings at MWC weren’t actually held at the convention center, so we’d either take the excellent subway, or grab a cab.
I don’t remember from where I was coming or where I was going, but we were making our way down Avinguda del Paral·lel and ended up back at Plaça d’Espanya. It’s a huge traffic circle at the foot of Montjuïc — basically a small mountain. Roughly translated, it’s “Jewish Mountain,” which is fascinating in its own right, never mind that it’s home to the National Museum, venues from the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, the Fira Internacionial de Barcelona (where MWC was held the first few years I went) — and is generally quite beautiful.
On the north side of the traffic circle is Arenas de Barcelona. It was under construction the first few years I was in Barcelona but by this time had reopened as a shopping mall. Before that — a bullfighting ring. It’s exactly what you’d think from the outside, with the shape and the red brick. It’s beautiful, and something we’d been past a million times at this point.
And it was flying by our taxi window.
The picture
In the back of a cab isn’t a great place from which to be shooting. It’s also a horrible place to grab your big camera. But that’s what the HTC Re Camera was made for, and why I had it in my pocket.
So I grabbed it and probably snapped as many pictures as I could before we sped by. (I don’t know the speed limit in Barcelona, but it always seemed faster than I expected.)
I don’t have the original images anymore — this was in a time before Google Photos, and my raw dump in Dropbox grew too unwieldy years ago. That’s unforgivable, I know. But times were different then.
I don’t remember if I did any processing in Snapseed. But it's almost certain, given the way it looks and my affinity for HDR edits at the time. Or it might have all been done in Instagram, which is where the only digital copy of this picture lives today. (I do have a cheap canvas print at home.)
But the way the finished shot popped. The horrid Instagram crop somehow worked, contrasting the curve of the arena with the edges of the frame. The red brick and railing against the wisps in the blue sky. The pink air vents looking like … eyes? Pink eyes?
It’s by no means a perfect picture. It’s low-resolution and a crime to only live in Instagram. It was complete and total luck that I snapped it in the first place, and whatever computational processing that merely needed me to click a button deserves a ton of credit.
But I still love it, and I can’t wait to go back.