WOW, THAT’S SURREAL!

Dick Pountain /Idealog 343/ 06 Feb 2023 10:27

I freely confess that playing with the ‘Generative AI’ image service Stable Diffusion over the last few weeks has been enormous fun. And why wouldn’t it, since I’ve been using my personal computers to create images for the last 30+ years and I’m a sucker for surrealism. You should now be sensing a ‘but’ coming. But perhaps I only enjoy this experience so much because I’m an amateur and dilettante. I don’t depend on selling images for my living, and despite various feeble attempts have sold very few – I make them purely for pleasure and publish them for free on social media and my own website. The fact that Generative AI apps confer the ability to create professional-grade, photorealistic graphics – even to those who lack any drawing skills at all – is not a threat to my livelihood.  

I chose Stable Diffusion over more popular platforms like DALL-E mini, Midjourney, Deep Dream, WOMBO, Fotor and the rest (and there are lots of them) because it’s really free, doesn’t lure you into subscribing, and it’s very, very simple: you can only type in text descriptions and save such images as you like from its stream of results. That suits me just fine because I’m not intending to create a manga comic or an animated movie, and the restrictions are the whole point: I save the most outlandishly ‘wrong’ interpretations as instant surrealist pictures. I have briefly tried both Fotor and Midjourney, and came away traumatised. The latter is hosted on the schoolkid-oriented social network Discord, whose frantic user interface is the most baffling, frustrating and vaguely threatening I’ve seen since I dipped a toe into 4Chan back in 2010.

Were it only a matter of using Generative AI tools to forge Marvel-type comics or Picasso-type paintings (which they do rather well) then the people who need worry most are  illustrators and animators who risk being put out of work by greedy publishers. But actually the rest of us are equally at risk from this ability to alter the appearance of reality itself so simply. Ever since the Trump presidency we’ve become overfamiliar with the concept of ‘fake news’ and ‘deepfakes’; for many years students have been able to plagiarise documents for their essays, but now ChatGPT can even write them from scratch. Generative AI gives anyone the power to create events that never happened and objects that don’t exist with almost undetectable realism. Wearing my political commentator’s hat I try to keep abreast of what the Far Right – currently the source of the most venomous misinformation – is up to. I feel obliged to sample the bizarre conspiracies and pseudo-sciences they conjure up, from anti-vaxxing and ‘black goo’, through graphene oxide, ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, to Bill Gates’s injectable nanobots. Google these at your peril. These propagators of nonsense aren’t just a problem for the USA either. For example Vanessa Barbara has described in a recent New York Review of Books the way the Far Right used YouTube videos during the Brazilian election that only narrowly unseated Bolsonaro (whose antivax policies killed 700,000, almost as many as Trump):“People who trust vaccines are called aceitacionistas (a neologism to describe people who accept things without questioning). Those of us who received Covid shots are ‘hybrids’ who have been ‘zombified.’ […] Despite exhaustive efforts from fact-checking agencies and the WHO, these groups continue spreading old falsehoods claiming that Covid vaccines contain microchips, nanoparticles, graphene oxide, quantum dots, and parasites activated by electromagnetic impulses. According to them, vaccines can carry HIV (the virus that causes AIDS), make coins stick to our arms, and give us the ability to connect to Wi-Fi networks or pair with Bluetooth devices.” You couldn’t make it up, but Midjourney could, and illustrate it with stunning visuals. 

The original Surrealist movement of the 1920s was an artistic response to the horrors of WWI, which employed unnerving and illogical imagery – both literary and visual – to satirise and oppose the conventional ideas that had lead to the war. It was a radical, even revolutionary movement, leaning toward anarchism and communism, which depicted the darkest aspects of human nature using an equally dark humour. A century later that dark humour thoroughly permeates our current popular culture, entertainment industry and even advertising. Generative AI could make such post-traumatic nihilism available as a visual weapon for everybody who desperately wishes to defy reality, which means quite a lot of people since reality is looking increasingly grim.

Am I suggesting AI imaging be restricted, licensed, even banned? Not at all, it can’t be done. Just as with handguns in the USA, this genie is well out of its bottle. (Memo to self: “genie with jewelled turban on copper lamp, octane render, photorealistic, style of brueghel”) 

[Sample Dick Pountain’s creepy concoctions at http://www.dickpountain.co.uk/home/pictures ]  

A FEELING FOR TRIANGLES

Dick Pountain /Idealog 342/ 05 Jan 2023 10:55

My column last month was a semi-temperate rant, triggered by the sensationalist reporting of advances in cosmology and particle physics by the mainstream press (the ‘wormhole in a quantum computer’ effect). I attributed this to the coming of age of successive generations reared on Star Wars and the Marvel Universe, which induces deep longings to flout the laws of physics.

Readers of a philosophical bent (assuming I have any) might have concluded from this column that I’m a red-faced, harrumphing old British Empiricist who lumbers around the world kicking things and shouting “I refute it thus!” but nothing could be further from the truth. By ‘further’ I mean that my philosophical views are 180° opposed to such an empiricism, if you believed that truth is organised as a 2-dimensional graph which I don’t. Instead I believe that all sentient living creatures, human beings included, are ruled by emotions and live in a world that’s constructed almost entirely by imagination.

There is of course a catch, and that is that those of us who think this way define the words ‘emotion’ and ‘imagination’ in a way rather different from, and more rigorous than, their use in everyday speech. I’ve suggested in this column several times before that emotions properly understood are evolutionarily ancient neural subsystems that alert us to dangers, attract us to food and to potential mates, persuade us to play or to freak out. They operate below consciousness but the chemical changes they produce in our bodies get detected by our senses as what we should more properly call ‘feelings’. 

And speaking of our senses, another confusion arises there. All living creatures must separate what is themself from what is the outside world by a barrier, in our case the skin. Of our five sensory subsystems, only taste and smell permit molecules from the outside world to cross this barrier: touch measures pressure and temperature on the skin while sight and hearing detect waves of visible radiation and air pressure. Having our skin penetrated by anything more solid usually constitutes an undesirable emergency, so our experience of the outside world is mostly via second-hand, internal, signals.

Our brain processes such signals to detect patterns in them, analysing those into smaller sub-patterns and storing them for future reference: whenever a new stimulus arrives the brain tries to recognise it by rebuilding an image from such stored components. We maintain an internal mental map of the outside world which is neither complete nor entirely accurate, constantly updated via Bayesian composition of new inputs, and which most importantly is coloured by emotional tags: we like or dislike the things and places it contains. The world we actually live in is an imaginary one, precarious and error prone but which evolution has honed to be good enough to keep us alive. People born with a desire to pet Bengal Tigers tended to have fewer offspring than those who preferred to run away (or invent the rifle). 

Part of this process should remind you a little bit of the multi-layer ‘neural’ nets used in the most successful AI deep-learning systems, namely the part about analysing and storing sub-patterns, but that’s as far as the resemblance goes. Computers don’t have bodies, nor emotions to protect those bodies, and most (not all) AI researchers remain staunch Cartesian rationalists who believe “I think, therefore I am”, when “I am, therefore I think occasionally” is closer to how humans really are. 

All those stored sub-patterns occupy a universe of the imaginary, not material things but possible ways material things could be arranged, unchangeable and infinite in number. A triangle is a triangle is a triangle and you can imagine or discover any shape, size and number of them. Seeing a real brown cow uses most of the same patterns as imagining a blue cow. We think by manipulating and recombining patterns, we speak and write by recognising and producing them, mathematicians study the rules they obey. Claude Shannon’s Information Theory, the foundation of our industry, is about transmitting them from one place to another. 

The point is such patterns have no power of their own to affect material things in the real world: that they can only do via our body and its muscles, by making them want to do something. Ever since Homo sapiens developed language it’s been inevitable that we would start confusing such patterns with things and wishing that they could do stuff directly. We developed science in order to understand why that doesn’t work, but not everyone wants to be so disabused, and some people make a living by exploiting and furthering such confusion. I’m perfectly happy to imagine blue cows, perhaps to write stories or make paintings of them, but I won’t try milking them…

[Dick Pountain likes Dr Johnson really]

 

MAGIC IN THE AIR?

Dick Pountain /Idealog 341/ 07 Dec 2022 01:08

I’ve been writing columns for a slightly scary 50+ years now, and while 40 of those were for impeccably rational technical magazines like this one, 10 of them weren’t. I started off writing in 1970 for the ‘underground’ newspaper Frendz, which like its contemporaries Oz and IT was devoted to the hippy counterculture: its content comprised sex, drugs, rock&roll and anarchism, liberally embellished with a welter of the newly fashionable paranormal, the wacky, the ‘spiritual’, the Indian gurus, flying saucers, telepathy and teleportation. Having only recently left my Imperial College chemistry course (in those days equivalent to 4-years-hard-labour) I was unsympathetic to such piffle, and still am. I vividly remember arguing with a colleague who claimed that the Russians had perfected teleportation, and asking him whether they still manufactured fork-lift trucks…

I mention all this now because I’m detecting a disturbing renaissance of Magical Thinking, this time from the most improbable directions of Cosmology and Particle Physics rather than Eastern religion. Magical Thinking, the belief that pure thought can directly change things in the material world, has of course been around for as long as Homo sapiens (and probably longer) because it fulfils two important psychological needs: it can relieve anxiety and also satisfy a desire to avoid effort. If you’re scared of thunder, invent Angry Gods to explain it, then invent rituals to placate them and make them stop it. Invent spells to do hard stuff like keeping tigers at bay.

The current resurgence of Magical Thinking has two main sources, sci-fi movies – upon which the current generation of science nerds were all raised – and the spookiness of nature revealed by quantum mechanics. Even back during those hippy days, some of my better-read opponents could point to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and say “even your science admits it doesn’t know everything”. That same impulse now emerges as the argument that quantum entanglement, which Einstein disliked and labelled “spooky action at a distance”, might provide an explanation for telepathy. Another similar impulse baulks at the cosmic speed-limit of 3x108m/sec and wants to travel like the Starship Enterprise to far off galaxies by using wormholes in space/time. Such ideas may be precariously based on real science, but then get carelessly abstracted, exaggerated and sensationalised by social media’s insatiable need for exciting content. YouTube brims over with lavishly animated videos that supposedly illustrate them.

What triggered this particular column was a headline that scientists have “created a wormhole inside a quantum computer” that even made the mainstream newspapers. Wikipedia’s entry on wormholes is a masterpiece of tiptoeing. They are “speculative structures [...] consistent with the general theory of relativity, but whether wormholes actually exist remains to be seen”. Less charitably, they’re sci-fi-leaning mathematicians playing with the equations. My view of simulating the universe on a quantum computer with 53 qubits is barely more charitable.

Richard Feynman was a great hero to me (over a recent weekend I watched all 8 hours

of his QCD lectures for fun) and even he admitted that entanglement, though true, embarrassed him. Recent work on quantum gravity may be relieving some of that embarrassment. It appears that entangled particles can’t exchange information, hence preserving the speed limit, and the expansion of the universe may refute the notion that quantum events are time-reversible – there is progression from past to future, as required by thermodynamics, even at quantum level.

Quantum weirdness does affect our everyday world in an immensely significant way. The electrons that form the chemical bonds between atoms in the proteins we’re made of are quantum particles, and they must obey Pauli’s Exclusion Principle – they can’t be forced into atoms where they don’t belong, which is what makes matter solid. It’s what stops me walking right through this wall out into the street. Without it the universe would be populated entirely by ghosts that can pass right through each other, which is of course what the Magical Thinkers would like to be true. So blame Pauli for disenchanting the world.

However unpalatable it may be, we live in the macro-world which obeys the rules of thermodynamics and gravity. We need to eat, if we trip we fall, get over it. If you need to move that palette with a ton of breeze blocks on it, no amount of wishing or spell-casting is going to get it done. A fork-lift truck will get it done. That doesn’t end the matter though: is that going to be a petrol or an electric fork-lift truck? That’s the sort of decision we need to start making without any further delay to avoid catastrophe, and Magical Thinking is just one of the many ways we have to avoid making these decisions (decamping to Mars is another).  

[Dick Pountain quite liked the sex, drugs and rock&roll part]

 

LOSING THE PLOT

Dick Pountain /Idealog 340/ 10 Nov 2022 09:53

I live in Camden Town, close to The Regent’s Canal down which I can walk in 10 minutes to King’s Cross. The area around this great railway station used to be squalid and dilapidated but a couple of decades ago renovations began that would turn it into what was briefly dubbed “The Knowledge District”. The British Museum in Bloomsbury was already close, so they decided to move their famous library to a new building at King’s Cross (one that King Charles III so famously disliked). Soon followed King’s Place, an avant garde glass pile containing concert halls, art galleries and the Guardian newspaper, then The Francis Crick Institute, a giant spiky armadillo of a building housing Europe’s premier biochemistry labs (and one of the runners in the Covid vaccine race). 

Then digital tech arrived. Google – sorry Alphabet – started its new European HQ which is almost finished as I write, a vast edifice the size of a city block (on a par with Fiat’s Turin HQ) with a whole park on its roof. Facebook – sorry Meta – pitched in with its own block-sized building, only just open, in that area between the canal and York Way which seems to sprout a new mini-skyscraper every time I walk though its Manhattan-lite main street. Deep Mind has a smart office there, as has a Tasmanian craft brewery that dispenses £6 pints from shining steel vats behind its football-pitch-sized bar. 

Ten years ago I might have imagined this as a preview of a hi-tech future but 2022 has rapidly clouded any such vision. In the last few weeks (November 2022) Facebook’s – sorry Meta’s – share price has crashed and the firm is laying off 11,000 employees; Elon Musk follows up his deranged take-over of Twitter by laying off another 4,000; most of the crypto currencies have been progressively crashing in value. A recent UK survey investigated public perceptions of various digital product categories like live streaming (94% approve and use), instant messaging (63%), text-to-speech and voice recognition (52%), but such approval drops off sharply for emerging technologies like Web3 (11%) and Internet of Things at 16%. Most had never heard of, or are bored by, Web3 (89%) and the Metaverse (84%), the virtual technologies Zuckerberg has bet his company on. 

Behind all the iPhone, Oculus and Alexa there remains a real-world, material economy which makes real things (like iPhones, Oculi and Alexas) using real people who once have real jobs, wages and pensions. The vast wealth that builds these opulent offices comes at a cost to that real world. The smartest minds are deployed to avoid paying the taxes that contribute to its upkeep: Amazon displaces high street shops; Google and Twitter displace local newspapers; Uber displaces taxi drivers; AirBnB hotels and so on and on. Newness and convenience have so far protected them from public wrath, but the metaverse suddenly becomes a revealing metaphor for the way the owners of these tech giants have detached themselves from the real economy. They can live in a retarded-adolescent sci-fi and gaming world where colonising Mars, or the pursuit of physical immortality can seem like good ways to spend money. Unfortunately for those fantasies the real world is where silicon chips are made.Along comes the Covid pandemic, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine reviving the Cold War and a 

semi-collapse of global supply chains. The USA once had a symbiotic relationship with China where cheap Chinese labour made cheaper products for the USA, while modernising the Chinese economy and reducing Chinese poverty. That relationship is turning sour, which unfortunately leaves most of the world’s semiconductor fabrication plants within China’s geographical sphere of influence. President Biden hastily tries to shut the stable door by decreeing the building of more fabs in the continental USA, but that will take a lot of time and money. And a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be a third whammy, leaving US tech industry in real trouble. 

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not denying the enormous achievements of the digital giants. The internet, the search engine, the smartphone, the video stream, even cryptocurrencies have changed the world already, and although in many cases basic technologies were paid for by state agencies – universities and military research –  no state could ever have achieved the astonishing global infrastructures that sprang out of Silicon Valley. I’m not suggesting that merely taxing them more heavily would magically solve our looming economic problems. A massive change of mindset is required to induce cooperation between states and digital giants to deploy this semi-miraculous infrastructure for solving problems on this planet, rather than on Mars or the metaverse. If that doesn’t happen soon, those shiny new office blocks in King’s Cross might end up being renamed The Museum Of Globalisation…

[Dick Pountain is as fond of a pint as the next man, but six quid!?]

 

   

MEME CULTURE

Dick Pountain /Idealog 339/ 07 Oct 2022 03:02

I just checked and it was nine years ago that I devoted this column to Richard Dawkins’ theory of ‘memes’ –  ideas that act somewhat like genes by propagating from mind to mind and perhaps mutating during that passage so that some survive while others perish. Examples could be religions and political ideologies. In that column I said meme theory  interests me as a metaphor, but that I only partly accept it as important ideas like ‘liberalism’ or ‘Islam’ are too big and baggy to be treated as single coherent things. I did however sympathise with him over the way giggling netizens were applying his serious concept to pictures of talking cats and cheezburgers.

Now in 2022 I can see how condescending that was, because the internet meme has developed a colossal momentum, becoming something between a genre of comedy and a subversive language. It’s not a form that I’ve practised much myself, being of a generation more wedded to older forms of pictorial subversion that descend from Dada, Surrealism and Situationism, like the cut-up photomontage or the single-panel cartoon strip with speech bubbles. What prompted my recantation was actually posting a proper meme of my own, based on that photo of Keir Starmer and Liz Truss at the Royal Funeral.

I did some online research to grasp the rules of modern memeography, and soon realised that the meme has evolved into a format almost as spare and rigorous as the Japanese Haiku. A single photograph with a caption – funny, mocking, witty, gross, dark, horrid etc – often split into an opening line at the top and a punchline at the bottom, superimposed in bold, white, sans-serif letters. I found sites like the ‘know your meme’ database that collect, analyse, praise and criticise memes, and apps that help you to author them, which I didn’t need as Snapseed does the job well enough.

I also realised that while some memes are political, most aren’t: they’re something different, though equally significant and interesting. Those Dadaist/Surrealist montages by John Heartfield and Hanna Höch that I grew up to admire were produced by a handful of artists radicalised by world war and revolution, whose mass media were the radio, newspapers and pamphlets. Today’s meme generations grew up not merely with TV and cinema, the internet and computer games but also the ubiquitous ability to generate their own content. They’re individualistic (perhaps no coïncidence that ‘meme’ can be parsed as ‘me me’), hyper-aware of appearance and attitude, competitive, easily bored, and permanently anxious about status and popularity. They employ memes as a hieroglyphic language in which to express and to laugh at fears and frustrations in almost therapeutic fashion. The best and the worst of memes combine gross humour and subtle cynicism in ways barely comprehensible to an old fart like me unless I make a real effort.      

What I did get nearly right nine years ago was the cat bit, because a frequent meme component is the subversive animal picture – some animal with an ambiguous facial expression that could represent a human emotion that can’t easily be named. The original lolcat asked for cheezburgers in a mock-cute pidgin language, but was soon deposed by grumpy cat who just frowned expressively, who got deposed in turn by that prairie dog that gave you a ‘side-eye’ glance which could mean either friendship or scorn. 

And then along came that damned dog with the inscrutable expression – quizzical? amused? wary? – called ‘Doge’ in meme world. He/she/it’s face gets deployed as a Lego-style component that can be attached to other things, for example, a grossly over-muscled gym-bod, to stand as a symbol of success, failure, complacency, anxiety or whatever. Doge so intrigued me that I paid he/she/it the ultimate compliment of looking them up on Wikipedia. Turns out to be a ‘she’ called Kabosu, of a Japanese Shiba Inu hunting breed. First rose to fame in 2013, since recognised as among all-time greatest memes, has a popular cryptocurrency, a computer game and a NASCAR winner named after her. But the ultimate tribute is that an NFT of the original Doge meme was acquired by PleasrDAO and fractionalized into $DOG token (whatever that means). Memes now not only are coherent things, but arty things that are hence ‘worth’ money.

While I apologise for my earlier condescension, I have to admit that I remain wedded to a rougher, more political style of memeing than is currently fashionable. My favourite memes  come from places with histories of dark, sarcastic humour like Glasgow and Moscow, about apocalypse, panic buying of bog-rolls and the GULAG. To paraphrase T. S. Eliot, perhaps the world will end not with a bang but a meme…

[Dick Pountain regrets that this column has no room to display his three favourite memes, but you can see them at XXX.XXX.XXX]

GO WITH THE FLOW

Dick Pountain /Idealog 338/ 05 Sep 2022 03:37

In last month’s column I explained how I came to terms with, and eventually even to love, taking photographs with my smartphone rather than a proper camera. I take even more pictures now because the phone is always ready in my pocket. What hasn’t changed is that I select a very few of the pictures I take to post online, on Facebook more than Flickr nowadays (since the latter was taken over by SmugMug) and recently more on Instagram too. Before posting them I examine these pix in a photo editor and often lightly tweak them, by cropping (I’m not squeamish about that) and maybe a touch of exposure correction and/or sharpening. Fewer still get selected for heavier mangling, with special effects making them into graphic art, to look like a painting or a poster.I started learning such post-processing tricks many years ago under Windows 3 in Paintshop Pro, then Adobe Photoshop Elements (which became so bloated and that I stopped at v5, hacking my install onto each successive new PC). When I jumped ship to a Chromebook I needed to find a photo editor with a layer-based approach the equal of Elements and SumoPaint did that for a  while until its publisher switched to a rental business model and removed the feature I used most. 

I tried AutoDesk Sketchbook which is a good-looking app with a clever user interface – so clever that it still baffles me and I use it only occasionally. Then a professional photographer friend introduced me to Snapseed, which he uses on an iPad but I’ve found is just as good on Android. It too has a clever, minimalist user interface that avoids lots of cascading menus, but its UI clicked with me instantly, and for those minor touch-up jobs it’s the best tool I’ve ever used. The exposure controls are superb, particularly an ‘Ambience’ slider which works subtle magic on the ‘feel’ of pictures, and a ‘Details’ slider for structural sharpening that’s as good as the Nik Filters I miss so much from Photoshop days. However it doesn’t support multiple layers – only a rather limited ‘double exposure’ – and its handling of text is limited and idiosyncratic. 

I happened across an online magazine article which tested what it claimed are the 10 best Android image editors and grimly set to trying them all. Most were powerful enough, but not in ways that help me: many are clearly aimed at youngsters into anime and manga, others way too complicated, but one of them called ArtFlow Studio grabbed my attention. 

At first it was more puzzling even than Sketchbook or Snapseed: upon launch you face a blank screen with a white dot in the upper left corner. Click on that dot and a very minimal UI does appear with a single row of small icons along the top of the screen, a pair of thin vertical sliders at the left edge, and a hideable Layers box at the right. No text is visible anywhere, though clicking and holding the icons does pop up a hint. 

It took me several weeks to uncover all the power I need within ArtFlow, because it’s organised in such an unusually economical and elegant manner that you need to adjust, to stop looking for items in menus. Everything descends from the six icons at top left which spawn visual palettes of brushes, erasers, smudgers, fillers and selectors while those two left-hand sliders control the size and intensity for each tool. Once I’d got my mind right, I began to appreciate the speed and uncluttered screen. 

ArtFlow’s handling of layers is extremely powerful, with more Blend Modes than either Elements or Sumopaint, and its effects filters are also excellent. I do miss a fractal filter that only Sumo offers (and from which I’d created a whole art-style) but it’s some consolation that ArtFlow has an unusually controllable Solarise filter that can create some very striking effects. Its one major lack is that ArtFlow doesn’t handle text at all, but this discovery lead me to make another that has completely transformed the way my imaging workflow works. 

Not only does Android’s Files App recognise Snapseed, Sketchbook and ArtFlow in its ‘Open With’ menu, but these three apps also recognise one another in their own Share commands, so if I need to add text to an image that I’m creating or editing in ArtFlow, I just share it straight into Sketchbook which has rather superior text handling, then return it back into ArtFlow. Sketchbook, Snapseed and ArtFlow Studio are all available free for Windows too (though both Snapseed and ArtFlow require Bluestacks or a similar quality Android emulator). If ever you’re feeling symptoms of menuphobia, one of them might provide instant relief.

[Dick Pountain wonders whether, if a picture is worth a thousand words, he might submit 4/5ths of a picture next month]

 

WHAT I DID ON MY HOLIDAYS

Dick Pountain /Idealog 337/ 07 Aug 2022 02:01

Just back from a holiday visit to in-laws in Scotland, our first proper break from London since the lockdowns disrupted everything. Before Covid we would visit Scotland most years, by car or by train, to Edinburgh, the Highlands or The Mearns of the North East. However, since PC Pro is not a travel magazine, I figure that the best way to tie this column into technology is just to describe what felt so different this time round.

Packing used to be a matter of some concern in the days of Windows laptop, tablet, digital camera and phone/PDA, along with their rat’s nest of cables and power supplies. This time I took just my Chromebook and phone, and though it would be nice to claim only one cable it was actually two. We flew by Loganair from London City to Dundee. I’d booked on their website and didn’t need to show any tickets (even on a phone), simply some photo ID. Once we arrived in Montrose reconnecting to the online world was almost entirely seamless, as my Chromebook remembered their wi-fi address and connected automatically, while the phone being new had to be told. Chromebook also effortlessly cast YouTube and Spotify streams to their Sony TV and sound system, even though they don’t have a hardware Chromecast dongle. And while once upon a time mobile signal coverage was distinctly iffy in Northern Scotland, but that’s no longer true.One of the day trips we made was through the rolling hills of the Howe o' the Mearns to visit villages mentioned in Lewis Grassic Gibbons’ trio of between-the-wars novels which I greatly admire. These hills were covered by a vast harvest of ripe golden wheat: the valley contains some of the most productive soils in the world, and around 85% of UK bread flour is from home-grown wheat. The hills also display quite a lot of wind turbines, which neither ruin the landscape nor incur the frothing NIMBY wrath they do in England. Out sea there are vast wind farms, some right on the horizon, slowly replacing the fading oil industry. 

For me the biggest change compared to previous visits was that while I took many photographs, it was with my phone rather than a camera (despite having often declared in this column that I’d never succumb). Last year my trusty old HTC phone died and I replaced it with a Moto G8 Power Lite which has served very well and takes far better pictures. That summer I decided to experiment using the Moto instead of carrying (or forgetting to) my Sony WX350 pocket camera, and I was pleasantly surprised by the sharpness and colour balance of its pictures, and the convenience of always having it to hand. What I didn’t like was its user interface, which often had me shooting videos when I wanted stills, and occasionally blurry pictures that took ages to process which I discovered was because I’d inadvertently pressed a tiny, indecipherable icon and turned on  'bokeh' mode. 

I grumbled on Facebook about such options persisting after the camera was turned off, and wished the phone would reset itself to defaults between sessions: a FB friend Tony Sleep pointed me toward Open Camera, a free, no ads app that’s way better than Motorola's own camera app and works well with most Android phone cameras. With that obstacle overcome I’m happy enough with the Moto’s image quality for viewing online on FaceBook or Flickr, though it wouldn't do for large prints. 

I still don’t like the narrow phone portrait format as used on Instagram and in FB 'stories', but I've become very fond of the wide landscape format. After six months of this testing, one day I took both my Sony 350 and the phone, snapped identical pictures and compared them. I concluded that both lens and sensor in the phone appear superior; that neither is quite wide-angle enough; that the Sony camera has optical rather than digital zoom, but I rarely use telephoto nowadays. My overall impression is that pix from the phone look good over a fair range of zoom scales but then quite suddenly collapse at the deepest zoom into ugly sharpening artefacts, while the camera’s pix degrade more gracefully with scale. Probably the phone’s tiny lens demands a more aggressive sharpening algorithm.This Scottish visit was the first time I’ve travelled anywhere with a phone as my only camera, and I have to say I’ve been delighted with the results, though it’s taken over a year to learn how to exploit its abilities to the full. So am I now tempted to spend £1000 to get a flagship Apple, Samsung or Google phone? Nae chance.

[You can see a selection of Dick Pountain’s Scottish photos at  https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?vanity=dick.pountain&set=a.10162151385019478]