When someone (like us) comes back from a trip to the Maritimes, they’re apt to have pictures of brightly-colored houses. This is to show those colors off and not just in houses. Plus a camera color conundrum.

On the northwest coast of PEI, probably near Cape Wolfe.

In that picture above, glance at the bit of beach showing left of the little lighthouse. There’s a color story there too.

Residentials · As it happens, our very first outing on the vacation was to Lunenberg, which features those cheerful houses.

It wasn’t just tourist magnets like Lunenberg; anywhere in the Maritimes you’re apt to see exuberantly-painted residences, a practice I admire. While the Maritimes are a long way from my home in Vancouver, we share a long, dim, grey winter, and any splash of color can help with that Seasonal Affective Disorder.

Also, we recently bought a house and, while we like it, it’s an undistinguished near-grey, so we’re looking for color schemes to steal. Thus I took lots of pictures of bright houses.

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A couple years back we painted our cabin a cheery blue based on sampling photos of the shutters on Mykonos. A few neighbors rolled their eyes but nobody’s actually complained.

Red · That’s the other color you have to talk about down east; I mean the color of the soil and sand and rocks. PEI in particular is famous for its red dirt, when you come in the on the ferry from Nova Scotia the first thing you notice is the island’s red fringe. I took a million pictures and maybe this is the closest to capturing it.

Not far from that first picture.

Green Conundrum · One of Nova Scotia’s attractions is the Cabot Trail, a 300km loop around Cape Breton, stretching northeast out into the Atlantic. This one scenic turn-off has you looking at a big, densely-forested mountainside. It’s more chaotic than our West-Coast temperate rain forests, with many tree species jumbled together. The spectrum of greens under shifting clouds was a real treat for the eyes. Here are two of the pictures I came away with. Have a look at them for a moment.

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Above is by my Pixel 7, below a modern Fujifilm camera. When I unloaded them on the big outboard screen, I was disappointed with the Fujifilm take, which seemed a little flat and boring; was thinking the Pixel had done better. But then I started feeling uneasy; my memory kept telling me that that mountainside just didn’t include that yellow flavor in the Pixel’s highlights. I mean, those highlights look great, but I’m pretty sure they’re lies.

After a while, I edited the Fujifilm version just a teeny bit, gently bumping Lightroom’s “exposure” and “Vibrance” sliders, and I thought what I got was very close to what I remembered. The Pixel photo is entirely un-touched.

I’m not sure what to think. Mobile-phone cameras in general and the Pixel in particular proudly boast their “computational photography” and “AI” chops and, yeah, the Pixel produced a photo that it’s hard not to like.

And quite a few of the pictures I publish in this space have have been adjusted pretty heavily in Lightroom. I stand by my claim that I’m mostly trying to make something that looks like what I saw. But increasingly, I suspect the Pixel is showing colors people like, as opposed to what’s real.