Cade’s Cove, on the western side of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, in eastern Tennessee, is one of my favorite places. Well, other than tropical beaches and islands, of course. I have fond memories of a long, beautiful valley of luscious green meadows, surrounded by pastoral, tree-covered mountains. Old farmsteads and churches built in the early Nineteenth Century dotting the valley floor.
All of that is still there, of course, along with thousands of cars and tens of thousands of visitors, including my family, during a recent visit this summer. Now, I didn’t really expect to have the place to ourselves, but I didn’t expect to be sharing it with half of the U.S. population east of the Mississippi, either. But, I know now. The eleven-mile loop road was a parking lot and the exhibits like ant hills with tourists forming ant trails scurrying between them and the parking areas. Mercifully, the wildlife decided to take the day off for the most part, and stay deep in the cool woods. Otherwise, I fear we would be still trying to make it around the loop.
Clearly, not a day for photography unless crowds of tourists were your objective. Forget shooting the beautiful vistas or the quaint log cabins, farmsteads, and churches.
All I managed were a few detail shots of some of the structures with my phone. As I mentioned previously, I am not a huge fan of iPhoneography, primarily because of image quality. Clearly, I am in the minority here and decided this was the perfect opportunity to give it a second try.
My plan was to take the photos with my iPhone, sync them to my iPad, process the images and create the blog post with the iPad, upload it to WordPress and wa la. Done.
Well, not exactly that easy. The iPhone and iPad are supposed to sync images through iCloud. And they do some of the time, but not always, and not necessarily all of the images. So, I bought a photo transfer app to make up for iCloud’s shortfall. The app, it turns out, has a hard time finding both devices to make the transfer, even though they are only inches apart. There are a plethora of image processing apps, all promising to be the best and easiest. Well, they are all pretty much the same. Outputting Instagram-like images that we all have learned to either love or despise. The app I chose to create and upload the post to WordPress crashed just as I was finishing up and I lost all my work.
So far, it has been a struggle and I am not at all sure this is the way I want to go. I am writing this on a word processing app and will copy and paste it into the draft the old fashion way, using the iPad browser. I will do the same with the images. Hopefully.
I’ll try a few more times in coming weeks, but I am not optimistic at this point. I would love to hear about your iPhone, iPad blogging experiences.
Any app suggestions?
There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept. ___Ansel Adams