Any time you get a new camera of any sort, you have to get a handle on it. It's an especially fun adventure with a phone, because the many engineers responsible for it are baking in all sorts of tricks and treats that are supposed to remain behind the scenes for most folks. Of course we're not satisfied with that, and will eventually want to know what's going on.
Here's an iPhone 13 Pro shot from yesterday:
This little one is a juvenile, and she seems not to have grokked the whole "run and hide" thing yet—she's let me take her picture several times now. (Of course I have no idea if it's a male or a female, I'm just assigning arbitrarily.) I was trying some into-the-sun shots, to see how the camera system behaves in those situations. (Quite well, is the answer.) I like the way her ears are backlit. It seems to me the iPhone 13 Pro is automatically correcting for loss of contrast due to flare—the setting sun was shining on the lens here—but I could be mistaken. I'll get a handle on it sooner or later.
Here's another thing the iPhone 13 Pro seems to be doing:
This woman on Seneca Lake setting off for a paddle with her two doggies aboard was very far from me, so I started with the 77mm-e "tele" lens on the iPhone 13 Pro and used a large amount of digital zoom—to access the control, you just hold your finger on the "3" spot (the three lens choices are given as .5, 1x, and 3), and the dial appears. Here I had a whopping 350mm-e dialed in (15x, 406mm-e, is the max). It appears that the iPhone 13 Pro compensates for the lack of detail by automatically applying processing to the image similar to the old "Paint Daubs" filter in Photoshop (it might still be in Photoshop somewhere, I dunno), which breaks up the areas of color into broad areas similar to "impressionistic" brushstrokes. The detail below will be 100% after you click on it, assuming you're seeing it 800 pixels wide:
It's a neat trick. I personally always kinda liked that filter, although I seldom used it. And by the way, it's a fine demonstration of contrast vs. resolution: the dog paddler is a picture with lots of contrast but very little resolution.
This effect seems fine. You can't expect to dial in so much digital zoom and not lose something, and this solution looks quite good on the phone screen. Again, it helps if you stay in context: this is a "supertelephoto" shot with a phone, comma, fer Pete's sake. Quite a magic trick. When I was shooting Tri-X, I never owned a 300mm lens, much less a 350mm. (The youngster-bunny shot also has a bit of digital zoom added to the "3" 77mm-e lens, but much less than the paddler.)
Here's another digital zoom shot with the iPhone 13 Pro, this one at 158mm-e. I was happy to see robins nesting on the back deck again; it's been a couple of years. This mother built her nest on top of an old nest, which is why it looks so tall. In the picture, there are actually two young robins—the second one is in front of mother's red breast, and is difficult to pick out. This is the second brood in this nest this year—there was another earlier in the summer. Robin hatchlings only stay in the nest about two weeks, and these are big, so they'll be off and on their own soon. Oh, and the apparent distortion seen in the gutter downspout isn't distortion, it's actually that way in real life.
If you click on this to see it a little larger, again you can see the effect of good contrast and low resolution in the nest area. And again it makes sense: Kodak research in the 1930s showed that people actually prefer contrast to resolution. I'd say the only problem with the iPhone is that it doesn't apply the effect consistently—it looks like you'll get it heavily if you use lots of digital zoom, but not otherwise. Oh well—just something you need to know, so you can take it into account.
Have a great Monday. I hope you'll come back again.
Mike
Book o' the Week
The Mindful Photographer by Sophie Howarth. I only know of Sophie Howarth from her time as a curator at the Tate Modern in London, but my impression then was positive. Her brand new book (it only came out a few days ago) is about slowing down as a means of enjoying photographing more. It's said to contain a curated collection of photographs along with anecdotes and explanation.
The book link is your portal to Amazon from TOP, should you wish to support this site.
Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
Ed Hawco: "I continue to be amazed and impressed by the abilities of the newer iPhone cameras. What still blocks me, however, is the workflow. I just can’t get my head around what the workflow is. iPhone photos go into the Apple Photos app, which makes them available on all your devices (if you use iCloud), which is nice. But they’re all just piled in there. You can sort into 'Albums,' but that’s pretty tedious. Whereas in Lightroom, my images are sorted by date (via the folders where they natively live) and by various tags, and the notable ones are typically grouped into collections. I have the original DNGs, plus multiple virtual copies. They’re all easy to find.
"But in Photos (the app) all I get is Albums. No metadata editing, no tagging, etc. How do I find images that are older than what I can tolerate scrolling through?
"Is there a way to manage iPhone photos in Lightroom, short of exporting selected ones? I haven’t found it."
Stephen Scharf replies to Ed: "Just some info for Ed Hawco's comment about workflow. I simply use AirDrop to send the photos from my iPhone to my MacBook Pro, curate and do high level edits in Capture 1 Pro 22, and final touches in Photoshop. I just put the files Air Dropped to the MBP into a folder, and access them there from C1. Easy-peasy."
[See also Adrian Malloch's and psu's replies in the full Comments Section. —Ed.]
Hank: "Carrying an iPhone 13 and my Leica IIIa would be an interesting bookended history of small format photography."
Mike replies: Wow, I'd stop you on the street if I saw that. I appreciate the way you think.
I sadly only have the obsolete iPhone 12. Still very happy with it may upgrade to the iPhone 14 if the photo processing brings strong benefits
Any way I have now convinced myself to sell the Rx100vii. Mainly stays at home now. Shame really since it does a great job. Like you it’s the phaff of another thing to carry around. Plus the complex method to share snaps.
Posted by: Brian | Monday, 11 July 2022 at 10:36 AM
If you keep this up, you'll turn into a wildlife photographer. Nice that the bunny doesn't fear you.
Posted by: Bill Tyler | Monday, 11 July 2022 at 01:18 PM
I'm still trying to figure out why, say, an α6600 with a sweet standard prime lens, would *ever* be 'left home' instead of on a neck strap on in one's bag.
Posted by: Arg | Monday, 11 July 2022 at 07:01 PM
Replying to Ed Hawco's comment.
Hi Ed, I completely ignore the iPhone's Photos app collection and instead use Lightroom app on the phone which syncs in my Lightroom Classic (desktop) account to the synced computer folder nominated in the LR Classic sync preferences.
Here's how I make that happen:
In Lightroom phone app, go to Library > Settings (cog wheel) > select Import and turn Photos (app import) checkbox on, along with anything else you might want synced like Videos, screenshots etc.
Once it has completed syncing to the Adobe cloud and back down to the Lightroom catalogue, then every time I take a photo on the phone – whether with the LR app or the phone's camera app – it will pop up within a minute or so in my desktop LR catalogue in full resolution (raw, in my case) with metadata and develop state all intact – an elegant system.
As well, I have un-synced the useless Photos app on my desktop Mac and tend to ignore it on my phone as the LR camera app does everything I need and more (Night mode, included).
If your Adobe Cloud storage maxes out and you don't want to pay for a bigger plan then just move the already synced and downloaded photos in your LR classic to an un-synced folder to become your iPhone archive. Then delete those same photos on your phone! Seems risky but you already have downloaded them so they are safely tucked away from the nightmare of sync-delete-Hell.
At that point, the Adobe cloud app's storage will free up space and it will continue adding the iPhone photos to the LR classic synced folder again.
I tend to get about 3 year's storage of iPhone photos along with a dozen or so folders of standard camera shoots in my 20GB standard Adobe photographer's plan.
Reach out if you need further help at the contact form on my website: www.malloch.co.nz
Posted by: Adrian Malloch | Monday, 11 July 2022 at 07:44 PM
Per Mike's examples, I'll just add that there is a Live Mode in the iPhone's camera system that will use multiple frames and can do things like blur water into a "long exposure", as shown here. Just put the camera in Live Mode, take the photo, and then after the capture, select the Long Exposure version of the specific capture.
Here's an example taken at Putah Creek in Yolo County, CA. While in Live View mode, press the "shutter button" just once, then select the Long Exposure frame by flipping thorugh the frames in the iPhotos app. The photo was converted to B&W in Tonality Pro CK.
As you can see, It works quite well.
Posted by: Stephen Scharf | Monday, 11 July 2022 at 10:10 PM
>> "Is there a way to manage iPhone photos in Lightroom, short of exporting selected ones? I haven’t found it."
You can use the newer "Cloud" version of Lightroom (used to be called Lightroom CC, but is now just Lightroom as opposed to Lightroom "Classic", which is the old Lightroom) to edit iPhone photos in a way that is closer (but not exactly the same) as the classic Lightroom experience. LR on the phone will automatically sync new pictures from the phone's camera roll over into the Cloud Lightroom catalog (much like the iCloud version of Apple photos).
I have mostly switched over to the new Lightroom over the last few years, and it is different but the same enough. And having all the photos and processing info across all of my devices (laptop, iPad, phone) is handy.
Note: In theory you can also have the Classic Lightroom sync to the newer "Cloud" version of the catalog. But I have tried this on occasion and for large catalogs it just doesn't work well. So I gave up. I have my older classic catalogs on a backup drive, but have stopped using them after migrating all the pictures (about 100,000) into the new style catalog.
If you don't want to deal with all this cloud nonsense you can also transfer the pictures by hand off the phone and into Lightroom using a USB cable ... but that is fairly tedious and error prone, and me getting tired of that dance was what finally drove me to use the new-style Lightroom apps.
Posted by: psu | Tuesday, 12 July 2022 at 07:48 AM
I’m constantly amazed as others have mentioned at what pictures the iPhone makes with little hassle. But, that said, I have the primal need to manipulate the various machined chunks of glass, metal and plastic to get images. More and more though, I find I’ll take film and digital side by side, only to compare it with and example from the iPhone later. I have iPhone handle adapters that come somewhat close to maybe holding a rangefinder, but it’s still a bit of a roadblock to accept as a picture making device.
Posted by: Bob G. | Tuesday, 12 July 2022 at 02:46 PM
For Bob-
With a Lightroom subscription one can set the LR mobile app to “auto add from camera roll.” Photos are then available to edit in LR mobile, and if signed into LR Classic on a computer the photos will also show up there. Changes made on the phone and on the phone will sync.
The problem is the photos now exist in two places (LR and iCloud). It would be nice if Adobe were to add a setting to LR mobile to delete from camera roll after import. It also requires a subscription.
Hopefully this helps.
Stephen’s tip looks pretty cool, will have to try it next time I’m by a river or fountain.
Posted by: James | Tuesday, 12 July 2022 at 05:03 PM