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Thrifty Thursday: an iPhone looks at the fall foliage

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American


Thrifty Thursdays feature photographs taken with equipment costing less than $500.

[Apple iPhone 4s - $300; autumn colors - priceless]

The easiest cheat in photography is to photograph only subjects that are naturally stunning. On Monday I walked about a New York woodlot with the red maples at peak color, shooting with my trusty little cell phone. The top photo is helped along by blue sky that perfectly complements the orange leaves; the bottom one by sunlight.


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I'm not going to make posters with photos from an iPhone. But these shots are fine for social media.

Alex Wild is Curator of Entomology at the University of Texas at Austin, where he studies the evolutionary history of ants. In 2003 he founded a photography business as an aesthetic complement to his scientific work, and his natural history photographs appear in numerous museums, books and media outlets.

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