Category Archives: iPhone

A smartphone with a decent camera

Upcoming deaths

iPhone, Photography

All change.

Here are some of the activities and businesses which will die with the oncoming tsunami of change powered by computational photography:

  • Professional wedding photographers – anyone can take a good wedding snap, and it only has a shelf life through the divorce date
  • Micro Four-Thirds cameras and lenses – they add nothing to iPhone 11 Pro quality at 4x the bulk and weight
  • Olympus – all their eggs in one basket …. and a handful of microscope sales and accounting fraud
  • Nikon – no diversification
  • Canon’s big gear division
  • Panasonic’s camera division – they managed to deliver a great FF body just as the format died. They should stick to TVs and washing machines
  • Pentax – no distinguishing product
  • APS-C – a ridiculous format which delivers the quality of MFT in the bulk of FF
  • All those silly-priced Zeiss lenses for full frame
  • The third rate garbage that goes by the moniker ‘Sigma lens’, an oxymoron if there ever was one
  • Most large format digital – silly priced, no quality advantage over big sensor digital bodies
  • Sony’s camera division. On the other hand their cell phone lens and sensor division will bloom
  • The last handful of reportage pros – everyone has a camera and the pro will never be in the right place at the right time
  • The mystique associated with ‘pro’ gear. It’s inferior in most practical aspects to the best cell phone cameras
  • DP Review – how many cell phone reviews can you do in a year?
  • All the other hardware sites for pixel peekers

Leica, however, will survive as there are always antiquarians with china cabinets to fill.

And it’s all because of this little part with 8.5 billion transistors in the area of two postage stamps, plus a team of very smart programmers:

And by the time Samsung has managed to steal all this proprietary technology, Apple will be on the A20. I provided an early peek inside Samsung’s design lab almost a decade ago.


iPhone 11 Pro fully loaded with case, credit card, DL, health insurance card and ATM card. Nikon? Not so much.

For the yearbook

iPhone, Photographs

Studio lighting mode.

After the test run the other day my son opted for the Studio Light portrait mode in the iPhone 11 Pro, donned a favorite shirt, combed his hair and voila! The shade of the orange tree makes for soft, diffuse lighting on what was a very sunny day. We only get 350 of those a year in Scottsdale.

iPhone 11 Pro snap, SOOC. The Portrait mode automatically blurs the background and the degree of blur can be changed in post processing.

Portrait modes in the iPhone 11

iPhone

Stellar.

I have to submit a snap of my son for his senior yearbook, so we took five test shots using the iPhone 11 Pro using the various Portrait modes built into the camera:





Regular, Studio light, Contour light, Stage light Mono, High-key light Mono.

Amazing.

Post processing in Lightroom? Zilch.

A tripod mount for the iPhone 11

iPhone

Light, cheap and comes with a remote.

Amazon has these tripod mounts for iPhones under various names. I chose the cheapest, the Jansite, for all of $8.95. You can pay many times this sum if you like, which will make hipsters happy, but this does the job well for very little. The iPhone does not have to be removed from its protective case, and the tripod thread is the standard 1/4″ used on tripods since Henry Fox-Talbot was a boy.




There’s no need to remove the protective case.


The rear knob permits changes from landscape to portrait orientation.


I mate mine with an inexpensive, light Oben carbon fiber tripod which comes with a handy QR plate which is bolted to the Jansite tripod mount, and despite its light weight extends to some five and one half feet. The days of massive, heavy cantilevered Linhof monster tripods are over, and mine goes on sale as soon as I finish writing this. You do not need Brooklyn Bridge construction when your camera is almost weightless and comes with state-of-the-art image stabilization.

But wait! There’s more!




There’s a tiny button on the side of the remote for power. A blue LED confirms power-on.


The Jansite, for the crazy $8.95 outlay, comes with a bluetooth remote. This pairs with your iPhone in seconds (Settings->Bluetooth) and I gave up testing its range at 36 feet. So now you have the perfect night vision (Night Mode!) setup.

As for cases, hipsters will once again rejoice knowing their precious iPhone can be ensconced in $100 cases made from hides from select Schwabian bulls, but the $16 Lameeku provides all you need – decent protection for the triple lens assembly, a grippable leather exterior far superior to the slithery native surface of the iPhone and, best of all, room for the rest of your life in the slide out holder.




Your life in your pocket.

In my case that means a Driver’s License, a medical insurance card, an ATM card and a credit card. All you need. Were Apple Pay ubiquitous I would do without the credit card. And just like the hipster $100 special, this will last 2 years (as have my last three) before you need to upgrade it, not because it’s worn but rather because Apple has come up with some startling innovation in its latest iPhone and, naturally, that will not fit the old case.