The telephoto lens.
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Here’s an index of the iPhone 11 Pro pieces:
Part I – The revolution realized
Part II – Upgrading
Part III – The ultrawide lens
Part IV – The Normal lens
Part V – The Telephoto lens
Part VI – The Focos app
Part VII – Quirks and anomalies
Part VIII – HDR and the Night Mode
Part IX – The digital zoom function
Part X – A lens correction profile for the ultrawide optic
Traditionally, a ‘telephoto’ lens was one whose physical length was lower than it’s optical length. One of the great early designs was the Tele-Elmarit for the Leica M which squeezed its 90mm into something
more like 70mm. In modern vernacular ‘telephoto’ implies ‘long’, which I suppose means anything from an 85mm portrait lens (FFE) to a 500mm monster beloved of animal spotters and Kremlin operatives.
So while it’s a stretch calling the 52mm FFE 2X lens in the iPhone Pro a telephoto, it is a nice long length compared with the other two lenses and is distinguished by its presence on the iPhone 11 Pro and Pro Max only. The regular iPhone 11 gets the two shorter lenses only.
As with the 1x standard optic, the 2X works in Portrait mode, meaning blurred backgrounds are automatically added in processing in the iPhone.
There’s not a lot to be said about the telephoto that is not obvious, and suffice it to say that it’s nice to have and trivial to switch to with a touch of the screen. And I’ll bet you dollars to dougnuts that a future iteration of the iPhone will add a fourth rear facing lens of 100mm focal length.
Here are some snaps from the 2X lens:
No flare with the sun in the image. Auto HDR does its magic here.
Nice spiral brickwork.
Outstanding control of dynamic range. This is what ‘computational photography’ is all about.
Symmetry, and trivial to capture.
Arizona architecture.
All of these are straight out-of-camera. The absence for much need for post processing with the iPhone 11 Pro’s images is a noteworthy enhancement, care of the clever software programming powered by that wondrous A13 CPU. It’s also notable in adjacent snaps switching between the three lenses that color, dynamic range and exposure are superbly balanced.