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Rummaging through an old box I found an old digital camera I bought in 2008, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3. It was hot stuff when it came out and I loved it. So much lighter and smaller than my previous Nikon DSLR behemoth.

But how does this 7 year old camera compare to my iPhone 5S?? Without any scientific rigor I went to the park and took one picture with each "camera" (the iPhone is not really a camera, it just has a (good) camera).

Note! The thumbnails shown below are heavily optimized for web use. You have to click to see the original.

Here are the pictures taken with the Lumix:

And here are the pictures taken with the iPhone 5S:

To compare, the best thing you can do is to open one of each so to say in separate tabs, or download, and zoom in and stare it down.

The total pixel area across all 5 images is about the same. The iPhone 5S pictures are slightly smaller in terms of dimension. The Lumix pictures are all 3,648x2,736 pixels. The iPhone 5S pictures are 3,264x2,448 pixels.

The 5 Lumix pictures weigh 19.1Mb and the iPhone 5S pictures weigh 11.6Mb.

Observations

• The color on the Braille sign, the 4th one, is significantly different. I can't tell or remember which one is "right".
• The last one, of the wall clock in my garage, was taken with flash on both. Interestingly, with the iPhone 5S, the picture was actually better without flash.
• The iPhone 5S pictures adds a yellowish glow which feels artificial but looks quite nice and warm.

In conclusion

I don't know which is better. The Lumix weighs more and is bigger volume than the iPhone and it doesn't have a web browser, GPS or WiFi. So if the pictures are about the same, the iPhone wins.

What do you think? If we ignore the practical aspect of carrying the Lumix, which pictures do you prefer?

First of all, Dropbox is awesome. When I plug in my iPhone to my laptop it automatically backs up all my photos to Dropbox fastly and conveniently. If I want to share a photo or a movie I can easily get a "Share link" to show friends and family.

The only disadvantage with Dropbox is that you only get 5Gb for free. Upgrading to the 100Gb Pro account is $10 per month. Not a massive amount but my inner geek uses that as an excuse to hack around it.

So, what I do is set up a S3 bucket. Let's call it camera-uploads-peterbe and then I use s3cmd to upload all the pictures by month. Like this:

$ cd Dropbox/Camera\ Uploads/
$ s3cmd put --reduced-redundancy 2014-01-* s3://camera-uploads-peterbe/2014/
$ rm 2014-01-*

I'm sure that by writing this here, people will write comments saying much better ways to do properly offside backups and I'm eager to hear that but for me S3 feels great. It's tools I'm very familiar with. It's a very established and mature business so it's unlikely to go away any time soon. It's secure and it's incredibly cheap because there's virtually no transfer of these files.

Also, I like how it's clearly explicit and simple. I don't have to worry about some obscure background app not working properly and me not noticing.

Let's see what the future holds. At the moment I'm just worrying about storing the files but it's a bit clunky to retrieve individual files.

UPDATE

For $99 per year I now get 1TB of space on Dropbox.

Also, the reason I discovered that way because s3cmd stopped working with these strange [Errno 32] Broken pipe errors. Lots of others have suffered from this too. I verified my access key and secret but didn't feel like spending too much time trying to understand explicit policies on S3 puts.

Yay! Dropbox!

I don't know who these guys are but I found their pictures on Orange Snapshot (Orange customers Twitter thing for posting pictures) and it appears that they're cycling across the country and documenting this by taking pictures and sticking them up on Twitter. I actually often check out Snapshot just to get a feeling what's going on in the country at the moment. It was great when the snow hit us.

Why is this important? Well, in these modern times it means that it's very easy to make a traveling photo documentary without a film crew or some obscure travel blog which forces you to write 1,000 words for every city you visit. Good work on you lads! Keep it up!

Here's probably one of the most innovative and clever shop signs I've seen. This is a picture I took when cycling home the other day on Rivington Street

I've now uploaded the photos from my latest holiday i Fuzhou, China.

Most of the photos are of kung fu training and that's because I didn't want to distance myself from the holiday too much by constantly being the the photographer. When we went training I lent the camera to our translator who at times got bored whilst we were just training and she loved to snap.

Basically, Chris and I had the great opportunity to learn the first form of Calling Crane by Master Ruan Dong and the first form of Dog Style by Master Hu Chen Wu both resident in Fuzhou in the Fujian province in the south-east of China.

I've now uploaded a selection of photos from the Miami Vice party we had on Saturday.

For those who got the invite but didn't come: look what you missed! We even had a live performance gig in the house which was cool. Thank you those of you who did it.

The theme was Miami Vice and like those parties where people dress like the opposite sex, there was actually more options for the guys than the girls. I went for the mint-green t-shirt with extra padded shoulders in a grey jacket with rolled up sleeves.

Clearly from watching these stats about cameras used on Flickr Canon and Sony Ericsson rule. Canon is totally dominating the usage of Point & Shoot cameras which doesn't surprise me. Even if I'm a Nikon user I still recommend the Canons for Point & Shoot if people ask me.

By far, the most popular SLR is the Canon EOS Rebel XT as you can see. It doesn't surprise me that much. It is a great camera. I had sort of hoped that my camera, the Nikon D70, would be more popular but perhaps it doesn't really matter.

Another interesting observation is how cool pictures people take with the Sony Ericsson cameras. It's amazing what can be done if you're a bit artistic. Most of those pictures are much better than mine taken with my much more expensive D70. Pictures taken with the Sony Ericsson 750i and the Sony Ericsson K800i

Yesterday it was Madonna's birthday. To celebrate her 48th birthday she put on a concert somewhere in London and after the concert throw a little party at the Lounge Lover. The Lounge Lover is a uptown cocktail bar tucked away on a little side street off club row where I live.

It was a lot of commotion. Staff of the bar swept the floor outside and put up barricades. Some paparazzis came already at half eight but the first celebrity didn't arrive until half nine. That was Gwyneth Paltrow

More and more celebrities came. One of the early arrivers was Kevin Spacy but he came in and walked past us so fast that I never had a chance to take a picture of him.

There were a lot of people that the paparazzis seemed to recognize that I didn't. In those cases I just took some wild pictures in hope that someone can explain who that was later. (for example, Lawrence Dalaglio who my flatmate had to explain to me who he was. Sorry Lawrence, I don't watch much television)

Last night was without a doubt an experience. I haven't seen that many nice Mercedes lined up since I was in Monaco a couple of years ago. Pet Shop Boys was the only people arriving in a limo and Jason Statham arrived in a regular black cab.

Now, let us see the pictures

Only very rarely do you get to see photos of the northern light phenomena but here on this site you get loads (all from the same location though). On the site they don't call it northern light but The Geomagnetic Storm Resulting From the CME (Coronal Mass Ejection) produced by an X1-flare near sunspot 696.

Whatever they call it, in lack of being fortunate to see one with my own eyes, these photos will have to suffice.

I've now finally uploaded all my photos from the trip to China.

From 1,000 huge jpegs (at 1.6Gb) down to 300 resized ones (at 43Mb) it took quite a long time to rotate, chose, colour modify and title. To do it I had to use digikam which is the best photo album organiser program available on Linux. Even though it's the best I've found so far it still sucks. It's frustrating when you have lots to do but it's free and works better than nothing and I haven't donated any money to it.

As you might have noticed I have had to reduce the image quality quite a bit especially of the thumbnails. Sorry about this but I see thumbnails as navigation, not the real content. If you want higher resolution images I might be able to get you the original JPG if you ask kindly for it.