I recently upgraded my old smartphone to a new one, an iPhone 6s Plus.  I wanted a bigger phone, and my husband and I usually stick with Apple phones, usually a model behind the most recent one. I know, my phone has been out a while, but it’s new to me.

On January 14, 2017, Joan and I went to the Reading Fire and Ice Fest in Reading, PA, USA.  It’s the third year in a row we’ve gone, and that’s how many years the festival has been happening.

Ah, but this year I didn’t take my DSLR.  Nope.  It was drizzling outside, and I don’t like to take my good camera out in the rain, but I figured my phone would be a decent proxy if I wanted to take some photos, like I did, of the beta fish ice carving above.

The camera in the iPhone 6s Plus is decent.  You can do those live photos now.  I tend to turn them into GIFs, like this one of my dog getting his belly rubbed. 

Ok, back to the fest.  Here are two more photos from the fest that I took.

 

Huh, I just realized that all three photos that I chose to feature here are carvings of fish.  I can be so thick sometimes.

I also popped these three photos into Lightroom to see what results I could do to jazz them up.

 

That’s basically the ice aspect of the fest.  As for the fire, here are a few that I captured on my phone.  You can see more of the fire photos over on my hooping blog.

As usual, it’s hard to capture frozen motion in low light on a smartphone camera.  At least my model of the iPhone isn’t immune to that.  I believe the iPhone 7 does better.

The iPhone 6s Plus has the usual decent iPhone camera.  It’s good in a lot of situations.  It’ll do.