Photo Perfect

 

Arlo Benington focused his camera on the distant birds nesting by the tropical flowers. “You can go closer.” said his friend Caius Dawson. Arlo sighed. He knew that, as the squirrels around his feet showed no signs of fear. However, this vantage point meant he could change subjects faster with less running around. He was going to explain it to his friend, but simply took the pictures where he stood and would show the comparison to the ones taken closer from yesterday.

Rather than comment on the pictures his friend focused on the screen, squinting, instead. “How old is that camera?” asked Caius. “One hundred and three years.” said Arlo without a pause. He could date the exact components if he wanted to, but the era was enough to describe it. “Last Push” he added when his friend didn’t seem to click into the implications. “You mean the last of the OldTech?” Caius finally grasped. Arlo nodded. “You know, if that’s your luxury item, you can probably upgrade it by now.” added Caius helpfully as he sat down in the shade. The two worked together often, but hadn’t spent that much down time together. It wasn’t quite as smooth as the in office relationship.

Arlo made a noise that meant, “Yes, but..” He took a deep breath, trying to decide if it was worth explaining the features of the camera he had now, vs the possible replacement. It had been a hundred years, but work to make devices compatible with everything else had left most of the focus on datapad cameras, rather than stand alone units. The new luxury model was available but was incompatible with the wide variety of “Last Push” lenses and other accessories. Luxury accessories were good, but hadn’t yet branched out yet to the same degree. “This one still works fine, and there’s replacement parts for it if it doesn’t.” It wasn’t the whole story, but sufficient for Caius to change focus.

Arlo’s datapad made a small beep. Caius had requested the photos and the camera wasn’t sending them, so the datapad had tried to alert him to the problem. It was a mostly known problem with the “Last Push” tech. It could almost join the network, but didn’t transfer large files very well. Arlo swapped the datacard storage between devices and resumed taking pictures. It was a quick enough workaround that getting a WaveTwo camera wasn’t critical.

Caius’ datapad was his luxury item, so it had a larger screen and more computing power than Arlo’s. He tweaked the photos while his friend took more shots of whatever caught his eye.

Arlo didn’t mind his friend editing the pictures, but he didn’t have much artistic direction. All of Cauis’ edits were automatic brightness edits and the occasional clumsy crop. Fortunately the edits were all an extra meta data packet rather than a mangling of the original file.

Caius did upload them to all sorts of groups and had the inside track to get them used them in various projects. Arlo wasn’t as enthusiastic with that end of things, and appreciated the effort expended on his behalf.